Broadway Babylon (53 page)

“When he’s not working, he’s golfing, and when he’s not golfing, he’s dancing.”—G
EORGE
A
BBOTT’S SECRETARY
when Abbott was ninety-five (at the 1987 Tony Awards ceremonies he asserted, “It’s because I love the theatre so much that I thought I’d stick around.”)

“I only stopped playing in my late eighties because my last tennis partner died. It was only natural I then turn to golf.”—G
EORGE
A
BBOTT
at ninety-four

“When my husband was 104 he was playing golf, and one day he fell down and I got in a panic—he was turning pale and his eyes shut and his breathing slowed down. I wasn’t sure if he’d hear me, but I yelled, ‘Darling, I’ll go get help. Just lay there.’ He spoke up and corrected me, ‘You mean
lie
there.’ ”—George Abbott’s wife J
OY

“I’m seventy-seven but I’m still beautiful. I’m not gay, though I have had very close gay friends. And I never had to do the casting couch bit, never had to kiss anyone or anything. I just worked hard and became a superstar. Now I’m taking it easy. Theatre’s a big thrill for me, and … I don’t mind playing gay. I played Laurence Olivier’s lover in
Spartacus
. But I’m not gay myself—unlike the last guy who played this role … that English guy from
Peter Pan
.”—T
ONY
C
URTIS
during the 2002 fifty-city tour of
Some Like It Hot
, in which he played Osgood (as did Australian Cyril Ritchard in the 1972
Sugar
)

“Remember when Streisand spoke about doing Shakespeare and Russian plays, maybe even Greek drama? Some people laughed. Some naively believed her. We’re overall too materialistic a society for big stars to do theatre while they’re big stars. Money comes first, art a distant second. In England there’s more training and craft, less money and greed, and there’s a smaller distance between the so-called superstar and the supporting player … they may have a monarchy over there, but among actors it’s much more democratic.”—R
EID
S
HELTON
(Daddy Warbucks in
Annie
)

“I always wanted to do a Noel Coward play, but I never really got the chance.”—J
OHN
W
AYNE

“Then I thought to myself, ‘Darn it, maybe I can’t do what Vanessa Redgrave can. But can Vanessa Redgrave do what I can do? Who’s kidding who
here?’ ”—R
AQUEL
W
ELCH
, who occasionally ventured onto Broadway, taking over for musical stars

“I’ve never known anyone in Hollywood as talkative as Miss [Geraldine] Page. I suppose that is why she lives in New York. With theatre, you get to repeat yourself every night.”—film star L
AURENCE
H
ARVEY

“Gerry Page is a superb Method actress. I once asked what method she used. She said, without batting an eyelash, ‘Talent.’ ”—H
ELEN
H
AYES

“To this day, people will ask me how on earth I managed to play Chinese in
Flower Drum Song
(1958). An even dumber question I get now and then is how come I wasn’t in the screen version, which was all Oriental actors. You can’t cheat the camera like you can on stage. Anyway, I’ve had plenty more difficult assignments. Such as playing Barbra Streisand’s fiancé in [the movie of]
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
.”—L
ARRY
B
LYDEN

“It was funny, because she really wasn’t a singer. When the album came out she said, ‘I sound like Donald Duck!’ And in fact she does.”—
Coco
costar R
ENÉ
A
UBERJONOIS
on Katharine Hepburn

“It is rather a mystery. Florence Henderson might have been an American Julie Andrews. At least on the stage. She had the voice and looks … but her only starring Broadway musical was
The Girl Who Came to Supper
[1963]. Why nothing came of it, and with her great reviews, who can say? Then of course she sealed her fate by going on TV and playing Mrs. Brady in
The Brady Bunch
.”—R
ODDY
M
C
D
OWALL
, who costarred in the stage but not film
Camelot

“People who only know him from
Law & Order
on TV are sometimes surprised to discover that Jerry Orbach had this big Broadway career behind him … a talented musical entertainer. He was brilliant in the original production of
Chicago
. Much better than Richard Gere in the movie. Gere used a funny, nasal, almost clownish voice for his songs that indicated he wasn’t comfortable with his own voice, and he was the only main actor who did not get an Academy Award nomination for it. He did … a fraction of what Jerry Orbach did in
Chicago
.”—nightclub owner T
AMMI
G
OWER

“I think our show [
Over There!
] was the last one John Travolta did before the movies took him. I remember how popular he was with the chorus boys. He was having lots of fun, loved the backstage life. But Hollywood … who can compete with that money and mystique?… Others too. Richard Gere—I think
Bent
was his last play. Such good work, and such a profound play.… We three loved all the movies we did, but we never lost the love
of working in front of real, live audiences.”—M
AXENE
A
NDREWS
of the Andrews Sisters

“Timing has so much to do with it. The two most influential choreographers Broadway ever had were Jack Cole and Agnes de Mille. Jerry Robbins and all those who came after learned from them. The younger ones endured, and they didn’t give credit, and eventually they became more highly rated than their actual work merited.”—dancer-instructor F
RED
K
ELLY
, who taught brother Gene to tap dance

“Jerome Robbins was a shark. He had no scruples … on
West Side Story
he’d pit the Sharks against the Jets. He wanted hatred to flow. He never trusted in the performers’ ability. He’d whisper to one cast or ‘gang’ member, ‘So-and-so’s going around saying your mother’s a hooker.’ There were actual fights and injuries on that show. Jerry didn’t mind a bit.”—
ANONYMOUS ORIGINAL CAST MEMBER
in 1987

“Well, of course it’s a shame about Abraham Lincoln [being shot] in 1865. But in 1800, there was an assassination attempt on George III in one of
our
theatres [London’s Drury Lane]. It would have been an even worse tragedy, for we only get one monarch in a lifetime, while you get a new president every four years or so.”—R
EX
H
ARRISON
during the American bicentennial year of 1976

“Talk about nerve and presumption. Andrew Lloyd Webber has made known his opinion that the great Richard Rodgers never really fulfilled his potential because—get this—he never created a ‘sung-through’ musical à la Webber [sic]. That English pipsqueak! He is Andrew Lloyd Webber rolled into one!”—B
UDDY
H
ACKETT

“Among celebrities, at least, white marriages where neither partner is attracted to the opposite sex tend to last longer. The relationship doesn’t turn bitter or disappoint due to sexual stagnation, and kids don’t usually strain it. They also have the strongest incentive to stay together—other than true love—which is business and image.”—C
HRISTOPHER
H
EWETT
, gay stage and TV actor (
Mr. Belvedere
), referring to Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne, contractually married fifty-five years, and producer-director Guthrie McClintic and actress Katharine Cornell, forty years

“You’d imagine stage biographies [to be] on a higher plane of truth than movie-star ones. Not when it comes to homo- or bisexuality. One biographer of Lunt and Fontanne says they never had kids because they were ‘too busy’ acting. What about all the busy straight actors who had children?… A book about Kit Cornell gives every detail about her working relationship
with her documentably gay husband, then skimps over her living with another woman during the 14 years between his death and hers [Cornell’s]. Deceit, thy name is biographer.”—K
EN
D
ICKMANN
, writer and Los Angeles Filmex affiliate

“I was in a play with them [Alfred Lunt and his older wife, Lynne Fontanne]. Lynne was carrying on something frightful about her devotion to Alfred. Mostly for show, of course. It finally got on my nerves. One day, during a dress rehearsal, during the break, she wailed at me, wringing her hands, ‘Oh, where-oh-where would I be without Alfred?’ I decided to tell her, for she wasn’t getting any younger. I said, ‘You’d be right here, where I am—playing your mother.’ ”—E
STELLE
W
INWOOD

“Lynne Fontanne
might
have become a luminary,
sola
. Alfred Lunt, less likely. He was too ordinary and yet too fey. As a team, they could succeed on stage together. Their one motion picture was a flop. But as a marital institution, they rose to new heights on Broadway the longer they were together. Put wife next to husband, and the audience no longer sees feyness or ordinariness, they see a reflection; they see what they want to see, and what the publicity tells them: a matrimonial model.”—E
ILEEN
H
ECKART

“The Lunts liked to give the impression they encouraged young talent mightily. That is to say, Alfred Lunt encouraged young male talent. Mightily. Their, or his, most famous protégé was Monty Clift. Who knows what really went on; who cares. Point is, once it became known, after Clift was a Hollywood star and unlike Lunt didn’t take a wife, that he was homosexual, Lunt—and Lunt and Fontanne—dropped him like a hot potato.”—R
EID
S
HELTON
(
My Fair Lady, Annie
)

“One of the more unusual stories about stage fan worship is Bram Stoker, the author of
Dracula
(1897). His vampire is the most frequently depicted fictional character in film history. But in his own lifetime, Stoker was besotted with [actor] Henry Irving. In his twenties, Stoker ‘found’ Irving and although he married, as tradition decreed, he dedicated the next three decades of his life to Irving, who used him as a servant. It was a happy relationship and helped Irving’s career. Poor infatuated Stoker could never have known he would create something more popular and lasting than Henry Irving, then the most famous actor on earth, ever did.”—composer and critic V
IRGIL
T
HOMPSON

“One morning shortly after Neil [Simon] and I were married, Neil announced to me that he didn’t want to be married to an actress. My immediate but
unvoiced response was, gee, I wish you had mentioned that
before
we got married, and
before
I was in rehearsals playing Lady Anne [in]
Richard III
at Lincoln Center!”—M
ARSHA
M
ASON
(the playwright wanted her to give up her career to raise his two daughters)

“There [have] been a number of successful plays about alcoholics. Men alcoholics. But audiences and particularly critics don’t care for plays about women alcoholics. Not even when Neil Simon writes one. We did
The Gingerbread Lady
, and it ran short of 200 performances, which for him is a flop.”—M
AUREEN
S
TAPLETON
(the screen version featured Simon’s then-wife Marsha Mason)

“I love the way the English have taken the thing over and spent all that money on it. It wasn’t that we didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the
thought
. The English were backward, we thought. They knew nothing about musicals. Now we’re eating out of their hand.”—producer-director G
EORGE
A
BBOTT
in the early 1990s

“Alan Bates was working with an American actor who’d recently found out that in England young boys are addressed as Master so-and-so. He didn’t know it’s used with the first, not the last name. He innocently asked Mr. Bates, ‘So you were called, all those years, Master Bates?’ The star didn’t speak to the young man for the remainder of the run.”—J
EREMY
B
RETT
, Bates’s pal and TV’s Sherlock Holmes

“Well, it’s no one
I
know”—actress C
ORAL
B
ROWNE
, upon laying eyes on a thirty-foot-tall golden phallus that decorated the set of Peter Brooks’s 1968 production of
Oedipus Rex
at London’s National Theatre. Its star was John Gielgud (who reportedly said, “I feel as if we should give the set designer a big hand”)

“It impressed me how offhand Sir James Barrie was about his popular reputation resting chiefly on one rather juvenile play.… I understand when a dinner companion once mentioned that not all of Barrie’s plays enjoyed long runs, the playwright answered, ‘True. Some of them Peter out and some Pan out.’ ”—S
IR
J
OHN
G
IELGUD

“Larry had a terrible fault as an actor, early on. He was a giggler. No schoolgirl in church was worse. I heard he’d been fired from one play due to giggling, and almost lost another because of it. It was Noel [Coward] who, with my help, determined to cure Larry of this disastrous affliction.”—G
ERTRUDE
L
AWRENCE
(
The King and I
) on her
Private Lives
costar, Laurence Olivier

“They asked me to star in the movie of the [British lesbian-themed] play
The Killing of Sister George
. I went to see the play, and I had to say no. It’s a very good play, but I told Beryl Reid, the actress who starred in it, that
she
had to star in the movie version. And she did. That role was absolutely
her
.”—B
ETTE
D
AVIS

“One wouldn’t ordinarily praise a tremendously successful theatrical producer. But this one had class—he even answers his mail [and] he has looks, youth, audacity, economic acumen … and heart—he’s openly gay, a rare and inspiring role model. In fact, he’s now the highest-paid individual in Great Britain, an all-Britannic success story.”—B
EN
B
AGLEY
on Cameron Mackintosh, producer of
Cats, Phantom, Les Miz
, etc.