Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 6
I cherished our Sundays together. One-on-one, Garth could be charming. I was seduced by the liking he expressed for me, even though I knew our relationship was mutually self-serving. Because I was the only person creating his radio and TV commercials, an ad agency rival would occasionally attempt to horn in by turning up with a script or storyboard. That’s when Garth demonstrated his loyalty to me, along with his appreciation for our shared cinematic approach, by allowing me to blow out the interloper, fast. He had a different persona in a group. Even on our Sundays together, the minute more people were added to the mix, Garth was transformed, becoming one of the great tyrants of show business.
Garth kept bringing in new shows while Phantom was playing. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love, a three-generation love-and-jealousy saga wrapped in chamber music had lost its $8 million investment on Broadway. The New York Times described it as “perhaps the greatest flop in Broadway history.” Garth nevertheless agreed to bring it to Canada out of eagerness to nurture his artistic partnership with Webber. He also wished to showcase the brilliant director Robin Phillips.
I flew out to see it when it opened in 1991 at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre. Although Phillips had entirely restaged it, the production seemed sparse, antiseptic and dull. I heard a group of theatregoers singing its big song, “Love Changes Everything,” in the intermission. That seemed promising, until I moved close enough to discover that they had changed the lyrics to, “It’s boring, it is so bo-rrring.”
I told Garth I thought Aspects was a loser. He remained noncommittal. As I learned, he would ride a dead horse till its skin fell off in a futile attempt to turn a dud into a winner. Bad reviews didn’t matter. When Phantom had opened in Toronto, the Globe and Mail had given it a zero rating. In Garth’s mind, this proved that critics were often wrong while he was always right.
He opened Aspects in Toronto at the Elgin Theatre. Everyone who attended the Tuesday meetings was praying that he would shut it down. Nope. There was always another place to send it. And another. As long as a show was running, Garth didn’t have to declare it as a loss, which helped when it came to making Livent’s books look good.
Since Garth was hungry for the next big one, he was constantly flying to other cities in Livent’s ten-seat jet, scouting productions. Though Garth’s company shared it with a major bank, I doubt they ever saw it. Garth would yell at the pilot, “Go faster! Faster!”
I need only four hours sleep a night. When I was on the plane on Livent business, everyone else would doze off except for Garth, who checked grosses hourly. This gave me another chance to talk with him, to study his style of showmanship, marvel at his keen attention to detail and be impressed by his dizzying mathematical skills. I learned that there are at least ninety-two ways to market something, and that you can never rest on your laurels.
I remember flying to La Jolla, California, where the rock opera Tommy was being workshopped by director Des McAnuff with Pete Townshend and The Who. As a child of the ’60s, at least in my own mind, I thought it was incredible. Garth proclaimed it a great load of horse manure.
As fate would have it, The Who’s Tommy became Garth’s chief competitor for Broadway’s highest-stakes’ game: the Tony Awards. Livent’s entry in 1993 would be Kiss of the Spider Woman, a gutsy choice for a musical, involving prison, torture, homosexuality and a fantasy diva whose kiss meant death. At director Hal Prince’s urging, Garth had agreed to produce it in order to keep alive their grand collaboration that began with Phantom.
For his Spider Woman, Garth cast Chita Rivera, who’d had her Broadway breakthrough in the mid-’50s as the firebrand Anita in West Side Story, but whose career had faded with time. It was fantastic casting, creating another star vehicle for Chita.
Since Garth was eager to get the buzz going, I had to produce Kiss commercials before we had sets or costumes. We built a jail cell for Chita. As the camera moved in, the cell doors opened and Chita raised her arms to reveal her web-like wings. Juan Chioran, a Spanish actor from Stratford, doing the voice-over, intoned, “The Kissssss of the Spider Woman is coming to the St. Lawrence Centre.” It was stunning.
Kiss opened in Toronto in the summer of 1992, in London’s West End that fall and on Broadway in the spring of 1993, where it received a standing ovation and enthusiastic reviews.
Kiss and Tommy were nominated for a dozen Tonys each. Garth attended the awards ceremony at the Gershwin Theatre in New York, while I watched a simulcast with a gang of friends and family at the Pantages in Toronto. Kiss won three Tonys in quick succession, then it was Tommy’s turn for a run, then Kiss again with some big ones: Best Actress for Chita Rivera, Best Actor for Brent Carver, Best Book for Terrence McNally. So far, so good, but then Hal Prince, who’d already won nineteen Tonys, was passed over for the director’s prize, and that seemed to lessen our chances for Best Musical. It was a nail-biting evening, electric with suspense, but Kiss won Best Musical too, bringing the number of the show’s Tonys up to seven.
It was an exhilarating moment for Garth. Kiss was his greatest critical success, and yet it would also prove to be one of his biggest disappointments. The show did some business after its win, but no matter how hard Garth struggled, he couldn’t turn it into a blockbuster. The story was too deep, too complex, too sophisticated and too controversial to find a significant audience outside of New York and London. When Chita left the cast, Garth replaced her with Vanessa Williams.
While filming TV commercials with Vanessa, she and I became friendly to the point where she recommended a herbalist to help me sleep. As I said, I don’t need a lot, but I do need some, and working with Garth was making the sleep I got fitful. Vanessa’s herbalist turned out to be a tiny Chinese man who looked like the Dalai Lama. He wore a giant $25,000 Rolex watch and wanted to charge me thousands of dollars for his herbs.
He also offered me advice. “Let me tell why you not sleep,” he said. He put his thumb on my pulse and announced, “You not sleep because you masturbate too often.”
I asked, “What’s too often?”
Garth hoped Vanessa Williams would draw in the black audience to Kiss, and it worked. Next, he cast María Conchita Alonso, a Latino star best known to North American audiences for Moscow on the Hudson. He flew in Robert Enrico, PepsiCo’s former head of marketing, and also a Latino, for advice on how to promote her. Enrico told Garth, “Mr. Drabinsky, Latin people don’t go to Broadway,” and Garth had him ushered out the door. That was the end of the magical Kiss.
Garth’s popular success after Phantom—the crowd-pleaser he so desperately needed—was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, also with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Inspired by the book of Genesis, it told the story of the betrayal of Joseph by his eleven brothers, his deliverance into slavery and his subsequent triumph at the Pharaoh’s court through his ability to interpret dreams. Garth’s choice for the lead was yet another example of his casting genius: Donny Osmond. As a former teenage idol and TV star who was struggling to reinvent himself as an adult performer, Osmond currently was, in show-business terms, a loser.
It was my job to market this dynamic, born-again performer for his breakthrough role. What Dreamcoat demanded, apart from a terrific voice, was an equally terrific ad campaign. For our photo shoot, we hired top-of-the-line photographer Bert Bell, with the hope of producing a full-page ad of Donny looking cool in jeans and a white shirt. Donny had stage fright. He was especially anxious about a scene in which he had to perform shirtless, meaning that he had to be buff. In his nervousness, he became forgetful.
When he arrived for the photo shoot, he said, “I forgot my belt. Can I borrow yours?”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t bring the right shoes. Can I borrow yours?”
“Sure.”
After the shoot, I received a call from Lynda Friendly, head of Livent’s communications, who was anything but friendly. Because she was Garth’s long-time employee and reputed mistress, she had some of his power, which she enjoyed abusing. She was clearly angry when she said, “Look, Donny says he wants to have dinner with you tonight.”
I was caught off guard. “Who?”
“Donny Osmond.”
Apparently, this request had not gone down well with Garth. Much as he liked me, I was just his ad agency.
Lynda laid down the ground rules. “Here’s the deal. You’re going to pick up Donny at seven at the Intercontinental Hotel. You’re going to go to Joe Allen’s for dinner, but you’re not going to talk about Livent. You’re not going to talk about grosses. You’re not going to talk about marketing. Nothing. Do you understand me?”
I said, “Okay.”
She said, “Call me afterwards with your report. Here’s my personal number.”
I was on my way to pick up Donny when I received a call from my wannabe actor and lawyer friend, Jerry Levitan. Jerry asked, “What are you doing tonight, Barry?”
“I’m having dinner with Donny Osmond.”
“Wow! Can I come?”
“No. He made a whole big deal about wanting to relax alone with me over a hamburger.”
“What restaurant? I’ll drop by and say hello.”
I couldn’t resist the rush of having someone I knew see me with Donny Osmond.
“Okay. It’s Joe Allen’s. I’m picking him up at seven. Arrive an hour later and come to our table. I’ll introduce you, then you can leave.”
I picked up Donny—a really nice guy who was beyond squeaky clean. Right off he said, “I’m looking forward to spending time with you without having to worry about anyone else.”
I didn’t reply. I was already sweating because of Jerry. I told myself that his arrival would just be a blip.
We walked into Joe Allen’s. Jerry was sitting at our table.
“Who’s that?” asked Donny.
I had no choice but to introduce them.
Fortunately, Jerry is funny, and Donny enjoyed his blunt sense of humour. When Jerry said, “My wife is the greatest Donny Osmond fan in the world,” Donny replied, “Let’s go and ring your doorbell.”
Jerry’s wife all but fainted.
It was a great evening. Donny and I kept in touch for a long time afterwards.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat opened in the spring of 1992 at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre, where it played for five years. At first it attracted Donny’s old teen fans, then word of mouth brought in thousands more. Donny also toured the show throughout North America. Garth had the mega, post-Phantom hit he had been looking for. The show spun money in every city, serviced by the multiple touring companies Garth mounted.
Garth’s next assault on Broadway was with a lavish recreation of the American classic, Show Boat. It was set in 1887 in Natchez, Mississippi, and dramatized the plight of the country’s newly emancipated blacks in a poignant love story. After Garth had seen what he considered a lacklustre 1990 London production of this Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II masterpiece, he dreamed of transforming it into a dynamic extravaganza. He considered it ideal for opening the newly constructed 3,000-seat North York Performing Arts Centre, then under Livent’s exclusive management. Once again, Hal Prince would be Garth’s director.
Before I met him during Kiss of the Spiderwoman, I knew Prince only from his picture on the cast album of Fiddler on the Roof. Twenty-five years had passed, but he still looked exactly as he had in that picture, with his glasses pushed back on his head, except now his hair was white. It was phenomenal to watch him direct. When he raised his hands like a conductor, you could see he had the entire show in his head—the actors, the choreography, the set, the lighting—much like Garth with his numbers. He was amazing. Garth and I flew in Livent’s private jet to Natchez, Mississippi, before the production began. Garth wanted to experience first-hand the angst of the black cotton pickers. The temperature felt like 900 degrees as we went from plantation to plantation. It was especially hard on Garth, still suffering the residual effects of childhood polio.
I knew exactly the voice I wanted for the commercials. I called CNN in Atlanta. “Who does your voice-overs?”
“James Earl Jones.”
The voice of Darth Vader!
I contacted Jan Eckman, Jones’s New York agent. She told me, “Sorry, Barry, but James is completely locked up. CNN has given him a million dollar buy-out fee to use his ‘This is CNN’ clip for the life of the network.”
“But, Jan,” I protested. “What I’m requesting is in a different category.”
Eventually she agreed. We signed up Jones, with his magnificent basso profundo, and I spent the next three years writing Show Boat commercials, then flying down to Los Angeles to direct him.
Garth had an unfortunate habit of adding more scripts—hundreds of them—to the list waiting to be recorded. Now James had conquered a childhood stutter on his way to becoming an actor, but if you gave him too much to read at once, he’d say, “We’re moving on.” His breaking point came when I handed him another Garth commercial that required James to say, “If you order your Show Boat double CD cast album now, you get a Show Boat recipe brochure.”
James said, “Barry, I’m not doing this.”
I replied, “I don’t blame you.”
When I got back to Toronto, I had to pretend to Garth that James couldn’t do the commercial because he had a cold.
Show Boat’s gala premiere at the North York Performing Arts Centre was marred by scurrilous publicity.
The original 1927 production had opened with a black chorus singing, “Niggers all work on de Mississippi . . .” This had later been changed to “Coloured folk work . . .” Garth had consulted widely in the black community, both in Canada and in the States, to eliminate potentially offensive phrasing, without sanitizing black history. Nevertheless, a Jamaican North York school trustee denounced the production, sight unseen, as “hate literature” posing as entertainment. Her protest turned even nastier when she attributed anti-black racism “especially [to] the Jews.” Anonymous flyers denounced Show Boat as “a cultural holocaust” and the North York Centre as a potential “gas chamber” for black culture.
Shocked that his good intentions had been inverted, Garth asked the distinguished black historian, Henry Louis Gates Jr. from Harvard, to critique Show Boat’s script. In a lecture at the North York Centre’s Recital Hall, which attracted extensive media coverage, Gates described the Livent production as a “victory for tolerance and sensitivity.” This shut down the protesters. Though a few turned up at the 1993 premiere, they were vastly outnumbered by approximately 250 North American theatre critics, who came to see the production for themselves, and applauded it.
Garth had made one miscalculation. He thought that theatregoers in North York, a suburban community to the north of Toronto, would be glad to skip the commute to downtown. As he later discovered, for many people, making that trip was part of the evening’s excitement.
Show Boat opened on Broadway in the fall of 1994 at the Gershwin Theatre. As a $10 million production that cost an additional $600,000 a week to run, it was described by the New York Times as “probably Broadway’s most expensive show.” Garth couldn’t stand fake extravagance, even on the stage. If the set design called for a Persian rug, it had to be a real one. To raise the money, he and his partner and financial officer, Myron Gottlieb, had taken Livent public the year before. A number of Broadway savants doubted the show’s viability. When he was questioned by a reporter for the New York Times, Garth replied with his usual arrogant aplomb, “You have to apply an innovative vision to the restoration of these shows. They have to be made larger than life and brought up to audience expectations. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it so it has implications for years.”
I sat behind Garth at Show Boat’s Broadway opening, celebrated afterwards with a no-expenses-spared party at the Plaza Hotel that was chockablock with stars. The reviews were marvellous and ticket sales were on their way to breaking records. I also attended the 1995 Tony Awards at the Minskoff Theatre. Show Boat had ten nominations and won five, including Best Director for Hal Prince and Best Revival of a Musical. The show played Broadway for more than 900 performances. After Show Boat went on the road, along with Phantom, Joseph and Kiss, Garth was boasting that by the end of 1995, Livent would generate 25 per cent of the North American box-office receipts in commercial live theatre, estimated at a quarter of a billion dollars.
The World According to Garth seemed to be unfolding as it should, and I was thrilled to be a part of it.
Chapter Seven
GARTH DRABINSKY:
CURTAIN FALLING
If Garth had financial worries about Livent, now a publicly traded company with responsibilities to its shareholders, he never telegraphed them to me.
He had critics, both in Toronto and in New York, who saw Livent as a house of cards on the verge of collapse. I defended him from them in good faith. Garth was paying our ad agency millions of dollars every year, and though payments were sometimes late, we had no reason to believe Livent was in dire straits. For every Garth doubter, you could find an admirer who saw him as the saviour of musical theatre, not only for the opulence of his productions, but also for the seriousness of their themes. The prevailing view was that Garth Drabinsky was on a roll.
