Jack in the Box, page 14
There would be no resistance, clearly. Our respective unions didn’t hold jurisdiction across the pond in such a way as to offer us any recourse. And as sole producer as well as creator, Andrew could pretty much do as he pleased, which had been his modus operandi his entire career. Only in the case of the legendarily tenacious Patti LuPone, who was originally jettisoned from appearing on Broadway in Sunset Boulevard, a part she had created initially in the West End, had anyone defied Lloyd Webber and emerged victorious in court, or elsewhere, as a matter of fact: in her case, the settlement paid for her swimming pool in Connecticut.
Some mild fiddling did, I believe, get done to the ordering of the book, some editing, some slight restructuring, but I don’t recall anyone finally being credited with “additional material.” Andrew wouldn’t want to pay royalties beyond what he’d already done; I knew that only too well. I never found out if Ben Elton ever came around for a second look, but if he did, it hardly registered. When, eventually, the production was announced for an American tour and the rejiggered result began its trek across the country, I flew down incognito to Atlanta to see for myself what was left of our original work. I seem to recall an Australian designer reworked Crowley’s conception by basically heightening the carnival aspects of the physical production, many of which were perfectly fine, if less elegant, and perhaps more insistently vulgar in their appeal. The dreadful story remained the dreadful story, no clearer, no more understandable. He moved his best song for the Phantom into his opening number, which was less effective for an audience still trying to put the pieces together from what they’d remembered, and not remotely understanding what the character might be singing about. And there were scenes virtually untouched from the West End version, blocking, gestures, scene after scene, precisely as I had left them. The soprano singing “Love Never Dies,” of which Lord Lloyd Webber continues to be so proud, replicated every nuance of Sierra Boggess’s performance, to the crook of a finger, and down to her charming, improv’d little curtain call.
What to do, with no legal recourse? Nothing. “Who steals my purse steals trash,” writes Shakespeare, and although it’s not much of a comfort, it still doesn’t end up costing you anything more than what you’ve already lost.
Do it for the money? Really? Only if you manage to clear some. I wish them all well. But … never again.
We’re warned, in the theatre, never to say “never.” For good reason. Years later, sitting alone at a table in Bar Centrale, the quintessential Broadway hideout above Orso, I was having a cocktail, waiting for someone to arrive, and deep into the crossword puzzle on my iPad when I heard something and, looking up, found Andrew Lloyd Webber’s face floating almost nose to nose in front of me, grinning and singing a lyric from Gypsy—“You’lllllll.… never get away from me!” he serenaded me, with that indelible, impish grin. For the moment I was poleaxed: What to say? “How are Madeleine and the children?” I managed. Neutral territory. He was simultaneously being hailed to a booth beyond me. “Splendid,” he crowed as he moved away.
“And that,” as Ethel Barrymore’s famous curtain line could have it, “was all she wrote!”
9
The Women in My Life (and Their Lives in My Work)
The miracle of help you never expected, or even knew you needed
Joan Houseman serves lunch to John Houseman and Ellis Rabb, at the Houseman home on South Mountain Road in New City, New York, 1970 or 1971
Are we all fairly comfortable now with at least acknowledging and even embracing the differences between the sexes? I no longer feel convinced, and seasonally, it seems, the pendulum can swing abruptly from one side to the other. Sensitivity has never been harder, and sometimes you feel as if the social rules are changing hourly. You can’t imagine how many gaffes I can sustain in complete innocence, I promise. But like men of all stripes, I assume, I am as fascinated with women as I am eager to celebrate our differences. But whatever one’s political position, we can easily agree that women have come far too late into the fore of the theatrical world, having suffered for eons by watching young boys pretending to mimic them in roles on the stage before being “admitted.” Shocking! And then the various other categories into which they have had to struggle before being invited—directing and stage managing being two.
There are, by simple historical necessity, so many men on these pages that I feel ashamed about not at least attempting to balance the scales, especially in the contributions women have continually made to my own development. When I began, only the professional influence of Le Gallienne was available to me on a personal basis, and idiosyncratic as she clearly was, others have had a more profound impact on me.
(Try as I might, I find I cannot move on from the delicious anecdotes of this amazing woman without one more scene, told to me by the late Anne Kaufman Schneider, daughter of George S. Kaufman, who fell under Le G’s spell when the latter played the role of Fanny Cavendish in Ellis Rabb’s immaculate revival of The Royal Family, a Tony winner on Broadway in 1976. Always slight and seemingly frail, she had succumbed at seventy-seven to a very bad flu during the run of the play, and Ms. Schneider arranged to have her put in an apartment a few floors below hers, so she could personally attend to her and be certain she was convalescing properly. At one point, leaving Le G in a vast bed, with only her small face visible amidst the covers, Anne was called back to the bedside faintly by the elderly actress, and fearing perhaps a sudden turn for the worse, she approached the bed cautiously. “Promise me one thing,” came the barely audible voice from the pillow. “If I should die from this, whatever you do, don’t let Helen Hayes have this goddamn part!” You have to love her, if only for that!)
What provides real insight into the mysteries of the female sex, so essential to any director’s sensitivity in handling emotional scenes? I have benefitted enormously from being taken into the confidence of remarkable women who have been as generous as they’ve proven indispensable, and whose voices and insights I hear every day of my life. They include:
JUNE ROETHKE: She was the elder sister of the late poet Theodore Roethke, and she happened to be my ninth-grade English teacher. A large-boned right tackle of a woman in a green knit suit, oversized glasses slipping down the nose of her plain, owlish face, she was a veritable terror who taught journalism to teenagers, but only to those who dared to confront her and basically ask for the privilege. The uninitiated, the intimidated referred to her vulgarly as “Moose” Roethke, and, indeed, she thumped down the halls like she was running NFL interference, and sat glaring at us from her desk by managing to open the wonders of poetry to select students, etching into our Midwestern brains the pure cadences of William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Walter Scott, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell: “O young Lochinvar is come out of the west, / Through all the wide Border his steed was the best…” or “Shut in from all the world without, / We sat the clean-winged hearth about, / Content to let the north-wind roar / In baffled rage at pane and door…” or “The snow had begun in the gloaming, / And busily all the night…,” intoned simply and directly in such a way that I can honestly quote reams of what she reported by rote without remembering ever having actually seen the pages. She never referred to her brother, his passing, his celebrity, and it wasn’t until many years later that I even learned of his body of work. She took me seriously, my needy pawing, my shrill insistence, for instance, that Gone with the Wind should be thought a more appropriate Great American Novel than Moby-Dick. You can imagine! She awoke something truly powerful within me, a pilot light of aspiration that only the best words in the English language can fully answer. She had nothing to do with theatre, nor knew I, then, of the inexorable pull of something like the stage, but we continued to correspond for years afterward. It was that somehow she “saw” me among all those random students. And said so. She outed me, as it were, to a passion for words, poetry, or, in John Houseman’s defining category, elevated text! Someone I secretly worshipped called to me, and in doing so, moved me slightly away from the pack. And, without my realizing it, I was never to be the same again.
DIANA MADDOX: She was a little pouter pigeon of a woman, with tousled gray hair, clutching volumes of reference to her ample bosom while trying to pull a shawl about her frame against the almost constant Southern California heat. She was always cold. Originally an English tea rose of an ingenue, she implied that she had been much celebrated as an actress originally for her remarkable Hero in a Christopher Plummer–Eileen Herlie production of Much Ado at Stratford, Ontario, back in the fifties, assuming at the same time that it might be possible to be thought memorable as Hero. First married to a Black supernumerary in that Stratford company, who died young, she took her lovely daughter to Los Angeles, where she encountered what I can characterize only as a Los Angeles lounge lizard of a producer who saw how smart, incisive, and clever was her mind, and who married her, I would imagine, to exploit her writing skills in support of scaling his own mediocre ladder as a minor producer. But she adored him. Tucked away into suffocating L.A., she channeled her remarkable energy into a major commitment to serve and explore the depths of Shakespeare, and like a demented sleuth, she immersed herself in finding out everything possible about verse speaking, the history of the plays, the arcane theories of Shakespeare’s craft. I, as someone steeped in the love of musical theatre, had pretty much skipped merrily over anything but the most simplistic study of Shakespeare during my education at the University of Michigan, so when I first confronted this basilisk of classicism as the dramaturge Craig had hired to prep our 1975 festival season, I realized I had met my match, and lay down meekly, saying, more or less, “Feed me.” She loved nothing so much as complete acquiescence and to be rabidly followed to the letter, and so she spooned into me everything she could theorize, which was a considerable amount. My first serious tutorial under her was with my first production of Hamlet, and I suppose I’ve yet to recover. As an example of her original thinking, she had concocted the idea that the first encounter between Hamlet and Horatio is not written in prose, as appears on the page and most scholars agree, but rather in blank verse, with the missing iambic stresses all tacitly there as pauses to be employed by the actor playing Hamlet. A cursory study of this section will confirm this as quite reasonable, like following the musical markings in a score made by a conductor. She insisted the pauses were all for the actor playing Hamlet, to be employed as he wished. Amazing! Whenever I come across those pages, it still raises my hackles.
When we worked together on the dramaturgy of my first Othello, she shoved a volume into my hands: “Son”: A Psychopath and His Victims, a nonfiction study of a psychopath who terrorized the Seattle community in the eighties, and murdered something like thirteen women, while believed to be the “nicest guy you ever met.” Diana showed me how, hundreds of years before we even knew of such a condition, Shakespeare’s characterization of Iago was a virtual case study of precise insight into psychopathy, illuminating for me the only possible way to direct Iago and still be able to call the play Othello. An “honest” Iago, seemingly transparent as a sheet of glass, is far more terrifying than a mustache twirler, and justifies the amount of text he is required to leave pristine.
She couldn’t quite deliver as a director what she could as a coach, and for a while she pushed me annually through the texts of The Tempest, As You Like It, Dream, and Much Ado as a kind of trial balloon for her own theories. But it was never quite enough for her, and when we eventually came to loggerheads over my determination to do a modern-dress Merchant (something she thought a vulgar affront), I realized that for her, my job was not to learn and take advantage, but rather to justify her scholarship. Period. It was the end of our courtship, but not of my evolving education. Great teachers do not always make you comfortable. Neither do their lessons. And finally I’m the better for the conflict as well as the bumpy ride.
JOAN HOUSEMAN: She was born Joan Courtney to a Russian mother and an American father, who fairly quickly disappeared from the scene. I believe she once told me that, for reasons unsubstantiated, she had been born in the home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, but she had very often brushed up against other legends equally carelessly, and I never cared to have it disproved. She was beautiful, that was true, and if her mother did manage to host something of an intellectual salon in Paris in the thirties, let’s say, or if as a child she actually had been painted by Picasso, as once obliquely mentioned, so much the better. What was indisputably true was that she ended up in her teens in Paris as a model for the House of Dior, and when she arrived in New York around 1947, as she stepped off the boat, she was the first woman in America to be wearing the New Look. Before that, she had met and married a charming soldier of fortune, the vicomte Guy de Foucauld de Lardimale. They had fallen in love as teenagers, and probably married too quickly. He was a restless youth, eager to pursue the promised romance of a dawning revolution in Spain. This held no interest for Joan, so she accompanied him up into the Pyrenees, where they kissed and said their goodbyes, then he descended into Spain and she returned alone to Paris. They were never divorced.
When Joan arrived in the States, she found a job as receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, where, I believe, she might first have met John Houseman. He was coming off an unsuccessful relationship with the blond and icy Joan Fontaine, who couldn’t seem to picture herself marooned in his lofty faux castle of an edifice on South Mountain Road in New City, New York. Joan Courtney, a very different version of his preferred cool, blond goddess, apparently could, and bore him two exceptional sons, Michael and Sebastian, while proving a witty and much-in-demand hostess as the droll foil to his perfected imperious mien. When Houseman joined Ellis Rabb and T. Edward Hambleton as producer intending to bolster the fortunes of their APA-Phoenix company, Joan, presiding over that same South Mountain Road retreat, swept the occasionally visiting me into her wake, challenging my fragile French, teaching me the correct way to peel and extract the bitter green center from garlic, and how, in fact, to cook in her effortless, organic French way, all the while exposing me to the prejudices of a remarkably idiosyncratic European intellectual—her tastes, her judgments, her sophistication … I was dazzled, and I found myself looking at a whole different universe through my Midwestern eyes. When, one weekend, among a troupe of my brunching contemporaries, she was presented a Bloody Mary in a large, cut-crystal goblet, she didn’t just say no, but in her precise Gallic way of translating, replied, “Ach, I mean to say … I cannot abide such heaviness against my lips,” a response at which we howled delightedly, and rushed to have printed on T-shirts for the next weekend we were all to be together again. I adored her, and finally, when Houseman was dying of prostate cancer and I was flying up to L.A. from San Diego each weekend to visit them in the Malibu Colony, he made it discreetly clear that I was to “look after” Joan. I took the assignment to heart. For many productions thereafter she served as my assistant, encased in her red fox fur with her pad and Tiffany pen, murmuring complaints to me about how much more interesting the lesser figures, the questionably immoral people in the play, were than all those square leading characters. The punishing irony of it all was that this most elegant woman succumbed to a disfiguring cancer of the mouth and throat, but true to her credo, rallied as best she could, throwing around her neck a series of beautiful Hermès scarves, above which her slightly obliterated face seemed to float, still lovely, still in her own eyes socially acceptable—until, of course, it wasn’t. She represented and does to this day the essence of “class” to me, something you almost have to experience firsthand to appreciate. As a woman of her generation, she inevitably walked behind, she ordered for others, she compensated, she made do, but when observed up close, her independent spirit, her impatience with vulgarity of any kind, her joy in all wicked adventure were lessons in embracing all aspects of life. And the quotes that echo in my mind to this day … “All greens go together,” “I don’t approve of ‘cooked wine’” (Lillet, for example, or anything but Fernet-Branca, which I could never tolerate), and best of all: “There is nothing more boring than perfection!” They are all stitched into my personal credo as securely as anything I studied professionally, and are inevitably more useful. One needs always to stay alert, and be prepared to be astonished by what others so easily might simply dismiss. Some of our most enduring teachers prefer to remain at best clandestine, after all.
Marsha Mason as Mary Stuart in a tech rehearsal, with Neva Patterson in the foreground, in Los Angeles, 1981
MARSHA MASON: Is it fair if I refer to her as my “Truth Matron” (an epithet first applied during rehearsals by her colleagues to a relentless youthful Rosemary Harris in the APA-Phoenix days, because she would suffer no logical stone to remain unturned)? Well, everyone in the arts needs one. That mine would turn out to be a film star of astonishing beauty and appeal is hardly the point. But that she has never seemed to be able to do anything but tell the truth is very much the point. I’m not certain I understood this originally, although to experience her work as an actress would certainly have indicated that deeper and purer riches lay behind those obvious gifts. I remember her demonstrating an exercise she had learned as an apprentice, when she would count from one to ten and back again, and while doing so, run the entire gamut of emotion, from laughter to tears and back to laughter once more, on a single breath. She has become for me the irreplaceable witness, the litmus test of whatever I am trying to accomplish onstage, without which I can no longer imagine feeling secure. Other friends, collaborators, producers, even our own inner voices … we all too easily wander away from reality, convincing ourselves all the while that what we’ve created is not only valid but astonishingly right. And yet, during one of the earliest previews of my revival of Carousel—faced with the casting of a mixed-race Billy and Julie, when I had been encouraged by my producer to make their courtship rawer, more brutal perhaps, more dangerously nuanced—when the lights came up for the intermission, the ashen expression on her face told me in a flash what I’d done: I had gone too far, I had overextended the delicate extremes of that dramatic relationship, and I had made the reality of true love now impossible for my audience to accept. She looked at me directly, her face a veritable storm cloud, and using just eleven words to tell me, whispered, “I would run from those woods as fast as I could.” The very next day I turned the scene around, to the relief of both of my actors. In truth, Marsha has a history of this kind of accidental dramaturgy: Years ago, after having watched a preview of A Chorus Line, she stood adamantly among some very proud all-male creative hands, plainly not happy: rather than add to the climate of general approval, she offered that they had missed the major emotional crux of the evening; by allowing Cassie to lose her job, she insisted, they risked the alienation of their entire audience, and she begged them to let the character land the job. The men were flabbergasted, but they knew the truth when they heard it so clearly delineated. It’s part of the legend of that remarkable show that in bravely standing up for Cassie, she might have pretty much nailed the success of the production. And with Carousel, I felt she did as much for me.
