One. Singular. Sensation is the defining anthem of New York in the seventies. I belt it out and the past echoes faintly back from the empty boxes and balconies, but the Broadway of Michael Bennett, A Chorus Line’s creator (one of my show-business pin-ups), is quite simply another world. In his day you could nip up to 42nd Street for a blow job during the coffee break at rehearsals. Now you can just get fucked up the arse by Mickey Mouse Incorporated.
My crazy bird dancer has blond curly hair, matching brows and lashes, blue eyes and big pink lips. He is the all-American boy, cornfed but catty. I meet him late one night on Second Avenue. He is wearing satin hot pants and football socks. He has a vial of that cocaine you get only in the seventies, and rockets go off in my head after the first hit, liberally piled onto an attached spatula in the relative shade of a bush. He has been dancing and fucking his way across the city – still up in that pre-dawn magenta light of another blistering day, cruising the park on Second Avenue. I am on my way back to Catherine Oxenberg’s flat in Tudor City. He lives in a gangsterish walk-up in the East Village. We go there. Tangled and spent, we sleep all day, and hit the street again, on point, fresh as cucumber, at that magic hour when the light begins to soften, and the reds and greens of the stop signs glow fiercely in the battle for the night. I walk with him through Union Square into Hell’s Kitchen. People are already sitting on the stoops, smoking and talking and waving at him as he pirouettes and soft-shoe shuffles towards Broadway.
‘How come everybody knows you?’ I ask.
‘That’s New York,’ he says, tapping to a final halt at the stage door of the Shubert and kissing me goodbye.
He never asks me to the show, but on the night before I leave I buy a ticket and sit high up in the rafters – miles away – and watch entranced at the amazing story of thirty different versions of him, chorus boys and girls stripped like soldiers of their individuality and suppressed into a unified chorus line just in time for opening night. One. Singular. Sensation. If only I could know, right now, that I will be on that stage myself one day and that everything will happen – or won’t, but that’s life for you, and I don’t, and I leave the theatre dejected and crushed, wandering into Time Square, doubting that I will ever amount to anything.
I have converted the old chorus boys’ room into a fabulous black penthouse. Compared to all the other dressing rooms in the theatre, which are poky, toiletless and windowless, one on top of the other, mine is completely private and includes two rooms, a loo, a shower and a terrace. Anda separate exit from the theatre, down a fire escape via the scene dock of another theatre – the Broadmoor – and even hitting a different block. (Jeremy Irons is currently torturing the public there. But not for much longer.) The only downside is that the staircase from the stage is steep and two storeys high. It becomes harder and harder to climb as the run goes on.
Standing at the ironing board in the chorus boys’ room, looking at his watch because I am two and a half minutes later than usual, is the person who is going to get me through the next six months. He is called Mr Geoffrey. He is an old-school theatrical dresser – tending towards musicals – that invaluable cog in the theatrical machine who can often knock some sense into a stampeding diva when lawsuits, lovers and a treasured director have failed. An hysterical sobbing star may have convinced the management that she can’t go on and desperately needs a rest and is thinking vaguely of suicide, but she still has to stagger to the dressing room and meet the steely gaze of her dresser, that curious creature, often an ex-artiste of sorts herself, but one who has been forced to commit her creative pretensions to an early grave, sacrificing everything to get some tipsy star onto the stage each night. She doesn’t put up with any nonsense.
‘I don’t want to hear that crap!’ Mr Geoffrey says now, as I crawl up that steep chorus boys’ staircase, wailing.
‘God! Mr Geoffrey, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve got no energy. I didn’t sleep a wink again last night.’
‘Don’t burn out on me! Don’t. OK? I am not dressing that flatfooted freak.’ (My understudy.)
‘Not even once? Could you get me a glass of champagne, please, darling?’
‘Not even once. So don’t even go there.’
Mr Geoffrey must be cruel to be kind, but kind he is. He has brought in his iPod, which is crammed with every show tune ever recorded. We kick off the previews with ‘A Chorus Line’ – my current obsession – and soon I have cheered up and am lashing on the slap while Mr Geoffrey sings along and the evening cranks up.
A theatre runs like clockwork on the day of a show. Everything happens at exactly the same time. First Erin arrives from Wigs with a wicker basket full of decapitated heads. A civilian may be forgiven for thinking that Erin has just murdered Angela, but in fact she is just making her rounds, and here she is, at 7.05, to stick a furry centipede called a front piece to my forehead. Erin is a red-headed giantess in hot pants. She is big and ballsy, in high boots and boob tubes, as if she has just climbed off a float at some carnival. She is having a turbulent affair with a dancer Mr Geoffrey knows. Mr Geoffrey thinks he has another girl. Gossip is the glue that keeps a company together, and my dresser and I survey the lives of the entire crew every night from our nest, sharing and dissecting the titbits we pick up in the field downstairs. Now we catch each other’s eyes as Erin re-enacts last night’s date. Mr Geoffrey shakes his head.
‘He hasn’t even asked me to his first night. Is that normal?’
‘Perfectly normal. You can’t go anyway. Who’s going to put on my wig?’
‘All I’m saying is I love you and you deserve more,’ reasons Mr Geoffrey.
These angels know that one of their jobs is to cajole me into a good mood from my swamp of self-involved despondency, and little by little they nudge me into a reasonable humour, like two parents with a spoilt child who won’t get on his potty. I attempt to convince them that I am on the edge of collapse. Now it’s their turn to look at each other in the mirror.
‘Come on, baby,’ says Erin, rubbing my shoulders. ‘You can do it.’
‘If those – I was going to say girls, but clearly they aren’t – discuss the menopause once more before Act One, I will seriously pass out.’
A gaggle of ladies and me congregate in the wings each night just before the show. Led by Jayne, the lady who plays my wife, all manner of lady issues are discussed, most of which I find fascinating. However, I’m not sure if I want to know who among the stage crew is still having their period, male or female. I’ve got to carry the show!
‘How can I go on stage being bubbly and effervescent when all I can think of are these undead vaginas wandering round in the gloom behind me? It’s too frightening.’ I am in high spirits now.
‘Just ask them not to talk about it,’ laughs Erin.
‘Already Mr Geoffrey has had to put me in thermals because various people insist that the stage is kept at sub-zero temperatures – which God knows must be eating into our profits. I won’t mention any names and I hope I am not unsympathetic …’
‘Wait a minute,’ interrupts Erin. ‘Are you saying you’re not sympathetic?’
‘No, I’m saying I am.’
‘But you’re not,’ says Erin.
Uh-oh! Home truth moment. I get busy with my make-up.
‘You nearly made Jayne cry the other night. There.’
‘Ow!’
She gives one final tug at my wig, picks up her box of tricks and moves on.
‘You haven’t been very nice to Jayne, it’s true,’ confirms Geoffrey a few minutes later.
I haven’t. She drives me mad. Actually she is the best thing in the show, but I just want to slap her.
‘Let’s see what Madonna thinks.’ Mr Geoffrey rolls his eyes and scrolls down the iPod. ‘Forget everyone’s menopause. This is putting you in the terrible mood.’
‘Where Do We Go from Here’ is my all-time Madonna favourite. It perfectly suits my mood, and soon Madge is soaring through the chorus boys’ room at full b
last.
‘Where do we go from here? Life isn’t what we thought it would be.’ I mouth the words dementedly as I apply more make-up.
‘My God,’ says Mr Geoffrey, ‘are you doing the show kabuki tonight? Ease off on the eyebrows.’
‘Really?’
‘Ladies and gentlemen, the house is now open,’ says the tannoy, followed by all the usual apparitions.
At seven-fifteen Bruce Clinger arrives. He is the company manager. He really is a throwback to the old days. He is a giant with a bald pate and a potato nose. He is extremely earnest and shy, a gangly youth imprisoned in a large middle-aged body. He may have started off as a dancer because his huge feet in their beautifully polished shoes often find themselves in fifth position. He speaks Broadway, another echo of lost New York. He is a Jewish show queen who started in the seventies and worked his way up. He speaks humbly and carefully, pitched high and slightly adenoidal, and there are still reminders in his voice of a stubborn Hungarian grandmother who refused to learn English. I adore him. He weathers my mood swings with humour and patience. We have come through Signing-In Gate and Alcohol Gate. I have a glass of champagne in the interval. I always have. Apparently it’s illegal and the theatre is going to be closed down, but we have reached a compromise. Paper cups.
Tonight I am spitting with fury at our producers. I think they are cheating me.
‘Bruce, I want to see all the return sheets, please. I just don’t understand why we are not making more money.’
‘Oh gosh,’ gasps Bruce. ‘I didn’t know there was a problem. I’ll toyck to the office about it.’
I swivel in my chair towards him. ‘I have a percentage, you know,’ I say grandly.
Bruce steps on his feet and wrings his hands. ‘Oh gosh. I’m really sorry you’re upset.’
‘Yes I am. Plus my back is agony. I could hardly get up off that fucking sofa yesterday in Act One.’ Etc.
He is funny and shortly we are laughing. In my egocentric madness I am soon convinced he is falling in love with me and, like one of those old drunken stage hags on the skids who have to suck the lifeblood from anything on three legs to survive, I decide to make him a project. Mr Geoffrey says I must have projects to get me through the run.
‘I’ve decided to make Bruce fall in love with me,’ I say one matinée afternoon.
‘It may not be as easy as you think,’ snips Mr Geoffrey, arranging some flowers. He is still angry with me for stepping on his hand.
Madonna joins in the conversation from the speakers. ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘You said I had to have projects.’
‘Not that kind.’
A couple of days ago I stand on Mr Geoffrey’s hand during the quick change and he has a meltdown, even accusing me of being drunk. I am quite shocked.
‘This is my livelihood,’ he screams, nursing the poor hand in front of my face. ‘How will I work if I can’t use my hands?’
‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Geoffrey.’
I am mortified, although at the same time I think to myself: this is all a bit Les Mis, with the hand and the livelihood, but anyway a wise mistress says nothing.
The next day Mr Geoffrey is in the room ironing as usual, when I come up the stairs. He is white. I am quite nervous myself.
‘Sit down,’ he says before I even get through the door.
I obey.
‘Rupert, I am so sorry that I went off on you last night.’ He puts his hand in front of his mouth and looks at me with those silly wide Polish blue eyes and then bursts into tears. ‘I don’t know what happened. I guess I’m just tired.’
‘Oh thank God, Mr Geoffrey. I thought you were never going to forgive me.’
‘Of course I’m going to forgive you.’
We hug and sob and are discovered thus by Bruce.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’
‘That’s fine, Bruce. Come in.’
‘You remember you were asking about percentages.’ Bruce is wringing his hands again.
‘Oh, yes,’ I reply loftily, regretting that outburst of the other day.
‘Well, God, you know, I don’t know how to put this, but you don’t have a percentage.’ He looks terrified, his mouth fixed in a terrible smile.
‘I don’t?’
‘You don’t.’
‘Oh, how very discouraging.’
‘I’m sorry,’ sighs Bruce, but he gives me my per diems instead.
On preview nights Michael Blakemore our director clambers up to the chorus boys’ room, slightly breathless. He is eighty-one years old with a bad knee and the climb is steep. Michael is a wise owl of a director with a magnificent head of white hair. He has sat through rehearsals hardly moving a muscle, observing us through ringed eyes – solemn and all-seeing, occasionally hooting the odd direction, consulting his French’s acting edition of the play for Coward’s original stage directions. Now he can be spotted during the previews in the stalls – a solitary figure with a plastic bag – in a different seat each night. In real life I am myopic but for some reason as soon as I get on stage I develop X-ray vision and I can always spot him, sitting rigid, a homeless person in a trance wedged into the animated crowd.
His face is completely inscrutable, even when Angela neatly cuts three-quarters of the play during an early preview and finds herself saying the lines of the last act during the first scene. It threatens to be a short evening but there isn’t a trace of emotion on Michael’s face as we turn the ship about and clumsily tack our way back to the beginning of the play. He is a great director with the strangest method. He does nothing. He watches and waits for the actors to discover themselves, nudging us gently into a performance with a raised finger and an ambivalent phrase (‘I’m not sure whether I would do that’), so that the process seems effortless and our own invention.
During an early set-to in the rehearsal room, he suggests that I simply drop the glass I am holding and freeze when I see the ghost of my ex-wife, while of course I want to have a full-blown fit. I loftily announce that I am not prepared to simply be everybody’s feed.
‘Well, what do you want to be, then? An epileptic?’ he asks, fixing me with his owlish eyes, the slightest hint of an upward inflection in his expressive voice. (He is from Australia and speaks in a divine dialect, now extinct, shared with other Antipodeans of his generation and profession – Coral Browne, Peter Finch – in which the cheerful twang of New South Wales is channelled into the frosty clip-clop of Received Pronunciation.)
‘What do you want to do?’ he asks again.
‘I want to steal the show,’ I shriek maniacally.
‘I don’t know how happy Angela will be with that,’ he replies, laughing. ‘Remember Coward played this role. He knew how to look after himself. Don’t worry. You’ll be terrific. But if you want to have a fit, it’s fine with me.’
It transpires that he was in the first play I ever saw (aged six), playing Badger in The Wind in the Willows. He is telling a story about it one day – how the eighty-year-old actor playing Mole falls from the stage into the orchestra pit during a matinée but is back on stage that night – and a brain cell burps from the hidden depths and suddenly I remember everything, the river bank, the girl with long hair singing, Toad Hall, and an alarming battle with some weasels. From now on I call him Badger.
On the night before he returns to London he comes to the dressing room to say goodbye.
‘Look after him,’ he instructs Mr Geoffrey.
I am almost in tears. He has become my father in this uncertain time and with his departure the prison sentence of the run is suddenly a harsh reality. ‘I want to go home too,’ I whine.
‘It’ll go by in a flash,’ says Badger.
‘I rather wish I hadn’t settled on quite such an energetic performance.’
‘Well, you wanted to steal the show.’ We hug and I watch him lumber down the endless stairs. At the bottom he turns. ‘You did, you know.’
‘Did what?’
‘S
teal the show. Speak soon.’
And he turns away, waving, while I collapse on the floor sobbing.
‘Save your acting for the show,’ says Mr Geoffrey, yanking at my bow tie and brushing me down.
Over the road from the theatre is Sardi’s, the most famous restaurant in New York. The faces of bygone Broadway stars, caricatures with vast heads and noses balanced upon hopeless matchstick physiques, cover the walls above faded velvet banquettes where groups of ancient Americans congregate before a matinée, dressed for Rosemary’s Baby. The waiters are a mafia – often as ancient as their clientele – and have perfected the art of passive aggression. They listlessly serve specialities that include Sardi’s wilted salad – comprising a sliced gherkin like a hepatoid cat’s tongue over a gigantic slice of tomato surrounded by dangerous-looking drops of pus. New York should really be renamed the big tomato.
The golden days at Sardi’s are over, but this year, the year I get old, it suits me perfectly. I sit at the same table every day. I make friends with all the sour-faced waiters. Like me, they have been embittered, and need only a little tickle to cheer them up. I know I’ve won over the hardest case of all with my special needs charm when I place an order and he looks at me for a second.
‘I wouldn’t have that if I was you.’
‘Why, thank you, Charlie. I’ll take your advice,’ I reply.
From then on he winks every time he walks by.
Vanished Years Page 27