Broadway Babylon (54 page)

“Robert Stigwood became super-rich before I did … from stage musicals and their record albums, like
Jesus Christ Superstar
and
Evita
and so on.… Among producers, he’s sort of a Howard Hughes. Just because we’re similarly inclined in our private lives doesn’t mean we have much else in common. Like, he loves the stage and I love movies.”—gay producer A
LLAN
C
ARR
, who teamed with Stigwood to make the film of
Grease

“It’s fairly well known in my circle that I have the same [suit] tailor as Marlene Dietrich. But it should be obvious to anyone that unlike the movie glamour girls I don’t wear
décolleté
. After all, I am a producer, and it’s a question of business and confidence.”—at one time, Broadway’s leading female producer, the closeted C
HERYL
C
RAWFORD
(
Porgy and Bess, Sweet Bird of Youth
)

“I have to give credit to Cheryl Crawford. In 1954, she gave me
The Diary of Anne Frank
to read. She passionately believed I could play it, and that my being Jewish could only enhance the performance and veracity. It was my stage debut [in 1955].… When it came time to cast the movie, Audrey Hepburn was first choice, and my not being a big name counted against me. It also, and I didn’t talk about this for years, did
not
help that I was Jewish. Hollywood wanted someone non-Jewish … it would reassure the audience and supposedly, and most ironically, make them more sympathetic to the Anne Frank they were watching.”—S
USAN
S
TRASBERG
in 1975

“Why does theatre attract more gay actors than the movies? I think it’s due to the camera. Not that the camera doesn’t lie—it does, often. But California people are more apt to place stereotypes in front of the camera. Theatre has more leeway, more faith in an actor’s ability to make believe. Casting for the stage is nowhere as rigid and discriminatory.”—stage and screen actor
D
AVID
W
AYNE
(
How to Marry a Millionaire
), Marilyn Monroe’s most frequent leading man

“I have a friend who’s straight and acts ‘soft,’ to use casting-director parlance. So he never gets big roles on screen—and he’s not old enough to play sexless authority figures. Meanwhile, a friend of a friend is gay, quite butch, and yes, a movie star. With a wife and all that. He was a star before her, but to
continue
his stardom, which was fading, the wife was worked in.”—heterosexual stage (
Bent
) and screen (
Gods and Monsters
) actor D
AVID
D
UKES

“Yeah, that’s cool. Everyone knows Harvey Fierstein’s gay, and why shouldn’t he play Tevye (in
Fiddler on the Roof
, 2004)? It is called acting, after all. And I hear most men that produce only daughters are gay-inclined anyway.”—J
ERRY
O
RBACH

“No question that theatre takes up more of an actor’s time than working in movies or on TV. That is, once you’re hired; getting hired can be full-time work in itself … I know of several actors and playwrights who have practically no social life or sex life, no time for nurturing relationships because they’re so dedicated to and involved in the theatre.”—B
EATRICE
A
RTHUR

“Yes, okay, it’s true. I was a virgin till my thirties. I’m a creature of the theatre. Next question.”—E
LAINE
S
TRITCH

“Of all the presumptuous announcements. Miss Helen Hayes, who was very married at the time, left a hit play [
Coquette
, whose screen version won Mary Pickford her Oscar] of Jed Harris’s in the 1920s by stating she was pregnant by an act of God! That’s the type of announcement they usually make hundreds of years later about the mothers of founders of major religions.”—D
AME
J
UDITH
A
NDERSON

“Neil Simon used to create such original and clever plots. Now an audience has to plotz through his latest reminiscence about dead wives, ex-wives, and former marriages.… This play, which I think is his 30th [
The Dinner Party
], is … is it fiction or nonfiction? Either way, it’s so personal,
he
should pay audiences.”—P
HILIP
B
RETT
, musicologist and Grammy-nominated conductor

“I made a prediction, when I was starring for her in
Toys in the Attic
, that if her boyfriend Dashiell Hammett ever died, she’d never write another play. She never did and never could after her editor and her advisor weren’t around anymore. She needed Hammett and [producer] Herman [Shumlin] to
come up with her biggest hits.”—A
NNE
R
EVERE
, who’d costarred in Lillian Hellman’s
The Children’s Hour
, won an Oscar for
National Velvet
, then was politically blacklisted

“I was telling a young actor who was considering doing a play about one particular play where the audience stayed away in droves. He nodded gravely, then asked, ‘Is droves like carriages or something?’ ”—an ICM A
GENT
in Los Angeles

“When you’re a minor actor or not very talented, yet you persist in show business anyway, you usually wind up either a talk-show host, a game-show host or, sometimes, an actor’s coach like Lee Strasberg.”—Broadway set designer J
O
M
IELZINER

“A charlatan.”—M
ONTGOMERY
C
LIFT
on acting coach Lee Strasberg, with whom he studied for a while

“I was thinking how it was just within the last ten years that [critic] John Simon felt free to call a play ‘faggot nonsense’ in
New York
magazine.”—playwright C
RAIG
L
UCAS
(
Prelude to a Kiss
) in 1993 on persistent homophobia

“Lesbians and gay men are the only citizens of the United States considered so despicable and heinous that they couldn’t even be depicted on stage.… No matter how anti-Semitic the country was, you could present Jewish characters.… You could show gangsters, murderers, and prostitutes, but you could not present lesbians or gay men on stage for fear they might be emulated or somehow be infectious.”—former publicist K
AIER
C
URTIN
, author of
We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage
(1987)

“Joseph Papp was a strange man in some ways … a huge ego for an initially noncommercial producer.… He could get very personal with you, yet he’d seldom discuss his gay son [who later died of AIDS].… And he discomfitted a lot of people with his strange way of trying to break the ice: he’d try and guess people’s weight!”—actor and acting coach (to James Dean, Jack Nicholson, etcetera) J
EFF
C
OREY
(before turning to theater, Papp had worked in carnivals guessing people’s weight)

“A friend asked if I wanted to share a unique theatregoing experience. Who’s in it, I asked? Two Australians. What’s it about? The ancient Australian art of gentle origami. That’s what I
thought
I heard … but origami is Japanese, and why ‘gentle’? So we get to the theatre, and the poster says ‘The Ancient Australian Art of Genital Origami.’ Oh-oh. And a banner says,
‘The Penises Are Coming! The Penises Are Coming!’ Too late: the show’s starting.…

“Well, it was not
paper
they folded that evening. I never knew scrotums were so … flexible. It just goes to show what lengths men will go to for entertainment in Australia’s Outback. Unforgettable!”—
Newsweek
senior editor S
ARAH
P
ETIT
on the 2001 Off-Broadway hit
Puppetry of the Penis

“I do think it’ll have a long run. Some people say a musical they can’t pronounce won’t run in the U.S.A. But
Les Misérables
has a universal theme that transcends its Franco-English roots.… It is not a star-making vehicle—that may or may not affect its run.”—P
ETER
O’T
OOLE
in 1987, the year
Les Miz
opened in New York (its Broadway run was later exceeded only by
Cats
and
Phantom
)

“If an actress pushes with finesse and backs it up with talent, sometimes she doesn’t have to take an audition ‘No’ for an answer. The classic example was Mildred Dunnock in
Death of a Salesman
. The playwright and director saw her strictly as refined. But Linda Loman was strictly a housewife. Irregardless [sic], Dunnock
had
to play the part—she’d even understudy. So she kept returning to auditions, wearing different housedresses, shifts, even padding … finally inhabiting the right dowdy look and nailing the character. Dunnock earned the part, and critics said she was born to play it.”—R
OSE
M
ARIE
(
The Dick Van Dyke Show
)

“I have been a victim of blacklisting.… This happened in a democracy, people targeted because of their private and peaceful political beliefs. People were hurt, even destroyed, because a small group of malicious and lying politicians decided to increase their power via irresponsible exaggerations, lies and scapegoating.… Fear and propaganda are alarmingly easy for politicians to spread. They’re even better actors than we are.”—self-described “liberal Democrat” M
ILDRED
D
UNNOCK
(1901–1991)

“One very large waste of talent and humanity was a victim of the McCarthy witch-hunts … Margaret Webster, a big-time stage director. She was the daughter of that old actress Dame May Whitty. Margaret was pro-Russian back when they were our allies [in WWII], so José Ferrer the actor fingered her. And he told the Congressional inquisition she’d employed a known communist who was Paul Robeson, a black man. They ruined Robeson—blacks weren’t supposed to have political opinions—and they tried to ruin his friends and coworkers; they almost got Lena Horne because she’d been Paul’s friend.

“So naturally Webster was ruined, all her career and future, after she had to go before McCarthy’s henchman, who was Roy Cohn, a gay Jew
but a Republican first and last.… The only ones who were immune to the blacklisting were conservative white men.”—dancer-choreographer A
LVIN
A
ILEY
(Webster, called “the ablest woman in our theatre” by critic Brooks Atkinson, was the first female to direct Shakespeare on Broadway.)

“The mean-spirited ignorance of too many politicians should not be downplayed. When a rabidly anti-communist Congressman was trying to kill the Federal Theatre and somebody quoted Christopher Marlowe, he demanded to know if Marlowe, present tense, was a communist. This ignoramus who hoped to obliterate theatre for the masses during the Great Depression when few people could afford theatre tickets had never heard of the immortal Elizabethan playwright.”—activist American playwright C
LIFFORD
O
DETS
in 1939

“I don’t know what was on her mind, but [Marie Christiansen] misread the end of her line. She said to us, ‘Now, as you’ve all been good today, children, Mr. Thorkelson will read to you from the book ‘A Sale of Two Titties.’ ”—M
ARLON
B
RANDO
, recalling an early stage experience in
I Remember Mama

“I knew [stripper] Gypsy Rose Lee was an intellectual when she said that men weren’t attracted to her by her mind—they’re attracted by what she doesn’t mind.”—boyfriend and producer M
IKE
T
ODD

“My husband took me to see the X-rated, all-nude play
Oh! Calcutta!
At intermission he turned to me and asked, ‘How come there are no erections? “Dummy,’ I told him, ‘these are professionals.’ ”—J
OAN
R
IVERS

“I thought he was an underrated actor. I once suggested he play Hamlet. He said, ‘I prefer New York to them small towns.’ ”—J
OHN
B
ARRYMORE
on Jimmy Durante

“The worst actress I saw on Broadway didn’t get there.
Mata Hari
closed in [Washington,] D.C., en route to Broadway. Anyway, she was imported by David Merrick, who cast for looks, not talent.… In this show, after she’s been executed by all these rifles, the curtain descends slowly. But as it’s coming down, Marisa Mell lifts her head to see what’s the Mata.”—actor J
AMES
G
REGORY
(TV’s
Barney Miller
)

“There’s a terrible yet delicious story about [actress-producer] Eva Le Gallienne’s 1980 production of
Alice in Wonderland
. During rehearsals, the costumes, which were made of Naugahyde, kept changing due to conceptual revisions. Finally, one cast member gave his opinion to a colleague:
‘That old dyke doesn’t care how many naugas have to give their lives for this show!’ ”—occasional stage actor V
INCENT
P
RICE

“Sandy Dennis virtually ruined my London production of
The Three Sisters
[in 1965]. Everyone there was looking forward to it … it was a showcase for the Method.… [Dennis’s] nervous tics were more than to laugh at, and made it unwatchable. Her stuttering took away from the suspension of disbelief, from everybody else’s lines. In the third act, when she says, ‘Oh, it’s been a terrible evening,’ somebody in the audience shouted, ‘It sure has been!’ When the show ended, there were boos, hisses, rude words, and noises. An incomparable catastrophe.”—L
EE
S
TRASBERG

“Some investors felt it might as well not have played, because thanks to [director] Tommy Tune
The Will Rogers Follies
didn’t make money. Tune chose and pushed through a set design which could not be seen from side seats, which therefore could not sell.… Some backers even blamed Tune when the show’s very popular dog act was locked inside a van which caught on fire, incinerating the dogs. That hurt some investors almost as much as the loss of profits.”—theater director D
EREK
A
NSON
J
ONES
(
Wit
)