Jack in the Box, page 9
And still the occasional visits continued. And still the brief, early pages were slipped into my hands before lights-out. After California Suite, a good chunk of Chapter Two. And eventually—be careful what you wish for, right?—he offered his latest effort, I Ought to Be in Pictures, with the generous suggestion that I would direct. I was, to put it simply, ecstatic. It was about 1980, and I had been contracted already for the Broadway revival of The Most Happy Fella, starring Giorgio Tozzi, somewhat past his Met prime, but with enough promise and clout to make an impression on Broadway, especially in one of its most beloved works. But think of it! A revival of a genuine Broadway classic musical as well as the latest Neil Simon jewel? Did any other director have such a planned schedule?
No. But in retrospect, I might have been a bit more realistic. The Most Happy Fella also marked the debut of Sharon Daniels, whom I had found at New York City Opera in my previous year’s production of Street Scene. This eagerly awaited revival was also to feature choreography by the gifted Graciela Daniele, the brightest and most promising of that season’s debuting choreographers. The result, if occasionally blighted by the vocal insecurities of its star, was shockingly lambasted in its opening review by New York Times critic Richard Eder, not for its cast, not for its staging, and not for its lavish musical luster, but rather for the conceits of the original book, a nearly classic staple authored by the late Frank Loesser, the inconsistencies of which could clearly have had no practical remedy, and it closed in three weeks. (At the end of that season, Eder was replaced by none other than Frank Rich, who, having seen all three casts of principals, proclaimed it the best revival of the year.)
But, please notice, painfully absent from the paragraph above is the presence of Neil Simon, who, at that point, was used to waiting for no one. Casting for his new play had yet to be done, designs needed to be planned, and his new director was elsewhere, out of town, in Detroit, and out of touch, for God’s sake, and, worse, at the service of an old-hat musical. This was not going down well. His producer, Emmanuel Azenberg, with a lifetime of experience with Neil behind him, tried to warn me … “Don’t keep Neil at arm’s length. Don’t make him wonder where you are. Check in! He’s a jealous god, for crying out loud. He needs to hear from you.”
Right! But what could I do? It wasn’t the easiest of tasks to wrestle The Most Happy Fella back onto Broadway, and there were ever and always crises of money, of personnel, even of litigation as we attempted to televise the production for Great Performances in Detroit, long before it was remotely ready and secure. I managed to show up in an empty Broadway theatre one afternoon when Hollywood icon Tony Curtis had arrived in town to read opposite a list of young women for Neil’s play. I sat center in the fifth row while Mr. Curtis quietly and without much energy suffered one or two of the women to go through their paces. But it was when the third woman, a very promising actress named Didi Conn, was reading that I felt a sudden presence behind me. Two elbows landed with a thump on the back of the seat next to mine, and when I turned to the right, there was the furious, boiling face of Neil, looking daggers at me. “Well,” he snapped, “aren’t you going to do anything?” He meant with and for Ms. Conn, obviously, but in truth I wasn’t paying all that much attention to her. I recognized almost immediately that she wasn’t the right instrument, and I had, instead, been carefully studying the presence of Tony Curtis, wondering to what degree he was capable of leading a Broadway play, or if, perhaps, this apparent lack of energy was simply the consequence of acting for his entire career with very few feet between him and a camera. “Oh, right,” I said, and vaulted up onto the stage, stopping the scene and huddling with them both to try to get some spark and energy into their choices. (At moments like these one would be amazed how effective the standard line “louder and faster, please” can cure all ills!) I regained my seat, they improved somewhat, and I thanked them both. Mr. Curtis was polite and at least receptive. Ms. Conn would do for someone else some other time. Neil seemed sullenly mollified, and no more was said.
But something had clearly gone awry, and I felt it in my stomach. That next weekend happened to be Marsha and Neil’s anniversary, and they had made plans to see The Most Happy Fella on Saturday night. I don’t recall what I was doing, but I was anywhere but at the Majestic Theater on that occasion.
The following Sunday morning dawned cold and rainy, and my telephone rang at about eight. It was Neil, and both the rain and the cold were evident in his voice.
“What are you doing?” he began abruptly. “Having my coffee,” I said. “How was the show?” “That’s what I want to talk to you about” came the steely reply. “I think you better come over here.” “When?” I answered. There was just one word before he hung up: “Now!”
Uh-oh. I dressed and made my way over to Park and Fifty-Seventh, where they had been subletting an apartment. I rang the bell, and Marsha opened the door, her face wet with tears. Behind her Neil stood, stoic and resolute. We mumbled a few banalities as he silently motioned for me to follow him into the den. The last thing I saw was Marsha’s distraught face as she stood across the hallway wringing her hands. Neil shut the door. I can’t really recall much of the next hour. I knew, of course, that I was about to face the furnace of his anger, his disappointment, his sense of betrayal that I had taken a choice opportunity and seemed simply to be listing it among my souvenirs. How could he, from his perspective, think otherwise? I became extremely calm, icy, even. And I recall thinking to myself as we sat down to face each other, Well, this is going to be interesting.
He began an onslaught, a rant, really, I felt as if I were in a film sequence. I could hear his voice, I could sense his almost titanic rage, but the words were so much bellicose sound, abstract, otherworldly. I had the distinct feeling I was lying at the bottom of Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum,” staring up with Neil’s distorted face above me, the blade coming ever slower, ever lower. Phrases came through, of course—his amazement that I would take such a stupid, innocuous story in the first place. I recall at one point him saying to me, “You may well know something about classical theatre, but that’s where you should stay. You have no business doing anything in the twentieth century. You have nothing to do with anything I write.” And then it was over. He rose and opened the door, and Marsha could still be seen in the next room, waiting. I was fired. He was replacing me. Period. That was it, and that was all. I found myself in the hallway on my way out the door, curiously still calm, still objective, still having heard, yes, but not feeling exactly leveled in the way he might imagine I should. I should be appropriately bloody, slammed, basically on my hands and knees, no? And yet I wasn’t. I turned at the door, and to this day, I cannot believe what came out of my mouth next. “Well, thanks, Neil. I’m really sorry, I truly am. But listen, if, down the way, you get into trouble, don’t hesitate to call me!” And I was gone.
Where on earth did I find the guts to say that? It wasn’t snide; it wasn’t smart-assed; it was meant, as God is my witness, in the kindest and most helpful way possible. I don’t think he said anything. I wouldn’t blame him.
In the year that followed, Marsha and I gently and cautiously kept up our communication and secured our friendship without further comment. And as Neil usually had, professionally, just three directors he entrusted with his work—ordinarily, it was either Mike Nichols, Gene Saks, or Herbert Ross—and inevitably he was out of sorts with one of them at a time. At this point, he and Mike were estranged, so Herbert Ross got the nod, and to say I might have been well out of it might be an understatement. About a year after that rainy scenario in New York, I found myself ringing the front doorbell on sunny Chalon Road. To be perfectly honest, I was delivering a discreet packet of marijuana for Marsha, although I confess this was anything but a normal occurrence. And, to my astonishment, it was Neil, not Marsha, who opened the door. He embraced me like a prodigal stepson and led me to the back porch, where we both waved at Marsha, kneeling among the roses far below in her garden beds, and settled down comfortably while he enthusiastically rambled through “Everything That Happened to Me in My Wonderful Career Since I Fired You,” as I eventually referred to the conversation afterward. There was never the slightest mention of our contretemps, nor any reference to the fact that I had been listed as the original director, as he regaled me with horrifying tales of the subsequent behavior of Tony Curtis and his costar, Dinah Manoff, daughter of the actress Lee Grant. Dinah had won the coveted role of the daughter, for which she was awarded a Tony as Best Supporting Actress that same year. But not before one harrowing evening during the Los Angeles tryout, when both actors, fueled by that decade’s common theatrical denominator of cocaine, behaved so outrageously onstage that they both stormed out of the theatre in a towering rage at the intermission, leaving a mystified audience to witness a second act with two completely unknown understudies playing the principal roles.
Neil genuinely loved telling me that story. I never figured out if, by that time, he had actually forgotten that I was originally hired and fired, or if he simply chose to finish that chapter without any damning reference that might impair our further social contract.
But here’s the kicker. Years later, he’d already debuted Rumors at the Globe under my artistic direction, and in this instance, directed by Gene Saks. He chose the same out-of-town route for Jake’s Women, which followed his Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Lost in Yonkers, in 1992. He and Marsha were divorced by that time, and he and I had settled into a very different kind of relationship. Without her as our reference, we found we still had a decade of common experiences of our own between us, and one night while Rumors was in process at the Globe, I prepared a quiet dinner for him alone in my kitchen, and we shared wine and memories like the best of chums.
Jake’s Women proved inevitably gnarly, as plays often do, but during its San Diego tryout, I found myself absent, in residence up in Los Angeles the entire time, while putting my production of A. R. Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour into the Doolittle Theatre and, at the same time, directing a television version of Tina Howe’s Painting Churches for American Playhouse. “Folly,” you might wisely think, but there was actually very little work to do on the Gurney, which was merely moving intact from its engagement at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, to a similar theatre. Little to do, that is, until the morning the phone rang in my L.A. hotel, and I heard Neil announcing, with his usual bluntness, that (a) he had just fired the young director he’d chosen for the San Diego tryout, and so, (b) there was clearly nothing for it but for me to take it over immediately! I protested that doing two things at once was idiotic enough, but three? And at a decidedly long distance?… I simply couldn’t.
Manny Azenberg was attending Neil in San Diego, and refusing both of them proved an impossibility when Manny calmly suggested the obvious solution—that I fly down on Friday evenings (since the television production didn’t shoot over the weekends), see the play, meet with the two of them for strategy after the curtain, get up early Saturday morning, rehearse the rewrites Neil would have done overnight, and in costly overtime hours on Saturday, prior to the matinee, put those rewrites into the play, see the matinee, take more notes, give those before the evening performance, meet with them both once more late Saturday night, and, on Sunday morning, after giving the last notes prior to the half-hour call at one thirty, catch at least the first act of the matinee before rushing to the plane for L.A. I would thus be back fresh and ready to shoot in Los Angeles from Monday morning until the following weekend, when I could begin the whole dizzying process all over again.
So, you see, I couldn’t really say it was impossible, now, could I?
It was during one of those few Saturday-morning sessions that the world turned back on itself for me. There were two scenes being rehearsed, an early comic scene with the leading lady, Stockard Channing, concocting a classic Midwestern accent in a kind of loopy fantasy Neil had invented, followed by an emotional confrontation between her and her costar, Peter Coyote, later in the second act. We did about forty minutes of work on the first scene, howling with laughter at Stockard’s inventiveness and tucking in new jokes and lines neatly along the way, then moved on to the serious second scene. After about twenty minutes, when we had discussed the approach to the new material, I was sitting about center in the theatre, in the fourth or fifth row, where I could easily interrupt the action as it evolved, when once again, I experienced the powerful thump of two elbows landing on the seat to my right. Looking over, I saw it was Neil again, but this time he was not steaming with anger. His eyes were wet with emotion, and in the pause that ensued, he quietly said: “I only know of maybe two or three people with a comic touch like yours who can make that first material zing like you just did. But in the case of this second scene, there’s only one who ever directed like that—that was pure Kazan! You’re the only person I’ve ever known that can do both.”
I had no idea how to respond to this, and at that moment, something happened onstage that deflected the necessity to try. Sometime later I realized the appropriate response: years earlier, remember, he had said I had “nothing to do” with his work, and, indeed, no relevance to theatre in the twentieth century, period. And now here I was, being somehow yoked with Kazan. Well, I thought to myself, if you couldn’t afford to believe that first condemnation, you can’t very well afford to believe this new compliment. So maybe it’s best to ignore both of them. Though I admit it made a kind of neat closure to Neil’s and my chapter, I was relieved and happy to move on.
A day or two later, both Stockard Channing and Peter Coyote were stunned to learn, not through the courtesy of a personal call, but by baldly reading the information published in The New York Times, that Neil was pulling the plug on Jake’s Women, at least for that season. The play, when it eventually appeared, hardly justified everything that had preceded it, and proved finally lucky for just one person—Stockard, who, in the shock of summarily losing one leading role, bounced immediately into another in John Guare’s brilliant Six Degrees of Separation, slipping simultaneously into rehearsal at Lincoln Center Theater that same fall, a role that, when it eventually transferred to film, was to earn her an Academy Award nomination.
It’s an ill wind … You know?
7
One of the Ones That Got Away
The road to subscriptions for a regional organization is inevitably littered with noble attempts the public never suspects
George Furth and Stephen Sondheim, Old Globe theatre, circa 1995
Running a theatre is not remotely similar to having a career as a director. This thought has probably occurred to many observers, but the latter has mostly to do with being a happy, successful gun for hire, while the former is rather like being responsible for the annual family picnic when you don’t know all the relatives, haven’t been told how many are actually coming, if you are meant to prepare a meal, for how many children, and who among them might be gluten intolerant. (And don’t expect anyone to thank you as they are pulling out of the parking lot at sundown!)
I was into my third guest assignment at the Old Globe in the summer of 1975 when Craig Noel, its single artistic director since its inception, took me into his office as well as his confidence, asking one or two leading questions about my career goals, and then stating that he felt I had “what it takes to work with a board of directors.” I assure you, that was not quite the compliment I anticipated or even understood. I had hoped he was keen on my blocking for the incipient Much Ado About Nothing I was directing, or approved of my note sessions, or just felt we were basically kindred spirits, all of which might well have been true, but getting along with the board of directors was nowhere in my field of expectation.
At the time, the future of the Globe was of considerable interest in the regional market. Craig, who was in his late sixties, had done a remarkable job over the decades at maintaining a vigorous and much admired company. Situated in lovely Balboa Park—with an annual summer Shakespearean festival comprising three different productions, and which attracted professional-caliber actors and artists every season, along with a regular winter season of eight or ten amateur productions serving the community—it was a popular, very successful center of theatrical activity, the pride of the city. In addition, there it sat in the midst of glittering San Diego, lush California, and the seductive Pacific! Who could resist such a package?
Damn few, it turned out; more than one aspiring director had privately fantasized about what might occur when it came time to pass the torch. One, in fact, William Ball, at that time as an enthusiastic young guest director newly graduated from Carnegie Tech, as Carnegie Mellon University was known back then, in the midsixties, overplayed his hand in a most original way. He had become so stimulated by this cornucopia of professional goodies that, as a guest director, he managed to crown himself on stage in the eponymous role of Henry IV, so indicating that it might be time to entertain a similarly significant shift in artistic vision. Craig, the mildest and most unassuming of despots, roused himself just enough to effectively have Bill banished from the premises until I contrived to bring them happily back together, some twenty years later. The Globe was a prize, no question, and was becoming a key player in the evolving national development of regional theatre when Messrs. Sondheim and Lapine chose us to launch the premiere production of their new musical Into the Woods. This was seriously big news: in one fell swoop, the regional markets came of age, and the commercial theatre enthusiastically and confidently stuck its nose irretrievably and permanently under our collective tents.
For a while, it was all something of a giddy honeymoon, and national critics were even content to remain at a discreet distance from Seattle, La Jolla, and the Globe, while for a chunk of financial support, commercial enterprises cuddled up to regional marketplaces, cheek by jowl, and suddenly, along Shubert Alley in New York, a byline appeared at the very bottom of various flashy three-sheet posters that read, ORIGINALLY PRODUCED AT THE OLD GLOBE, SAN DIEGO, or Chicago, or possibly the Long Wharf in Connecticut. That’s how my own production of Damn Yankees had happened, and as a direct result, the very producers of that happy event were to return to us in the midnineties with yet another possibility I found equally impossible to ignore: Carnival!, a beloved and thoroughly delightful musical that hadn’t been seen on Broadway since the sixties and was ripe for a reevaluation.
