Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  After opening night of the workshop, The Boys in the Band sold out its other four performances, which quickly grew to nine—the audiences virtually all male. Richard Barr wasted no time taking out an option for a full commercial production at Theater Four on West Fifty-Fifth Street. Edward Albee, however, did not come aboard as producer or investor. “I found it highly skillful work that I despised,” he said. “Barr understood the commercial value of the play. He may have liked it a great deal. I expressed my opinion that the play did serious damage to a burgeoning gay respectability movement in New York City. That’s why I was opposed to it being produced.”

  Crowley would later scoff at that criticism. “It was 1968! There was no gay respectability movement,” he said.

  Albee wasn’t the only one at the Playwrights’ Unit to object to The Boys in the Band. The third partner in the triumvirate left the theater over objections to the play. As Crowley described him, “Clinton Wilder was a wealthy man, who was a patron of the arts. He was very uptight for a gay man, and he wanted nothing to do with The Boys in the Band.”

  Wilder drew the line somewhere between The Boys in the Band and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which he’d been skittish about getting involved with half a dozen years earlier. Back in 1962, when he first showed an early draft of Virginia Woolf to the show’s press agent, Howard Atlee, he cautioned, “Here it is, if you can get through it.” And even Virginia Woolf did not get to Broadway without some reservations from the more liberal Richard Barr, who thought the script overused the words “fuck” and “motherfucker,” which had been uttered Off Broadway but never on Broadway. Barr told Albee, “I’ll take one ‘fuck’ uptown.” The producer feared that “the sensationalism of breaking the ‘word-barrier’ would prejudice” reviewers, maybe even “revolt” them. In the end, Albee substituted the word “screw” and went on to also remove “shit” and “bullshit,” replacing them with “hell,” “crap,” and “nuts.”

  “Fuck,” uttered a few times in The Boys in the Band, was minor stuff in 1968, although the word had not yet been heard in a Broadway show. “When we closed [at the Unit], word had it that maybe somebody would stage the play off-Broadway, and maybe on Broadway,” Cliff Gorman recalled. “So there was a lot of laughter about that, because we said it couldn’t be done. You know, you couldn’t say ‘fuck’ on the [Broadway] stage at that time. So we all packed up our make-up and went home” after the show’s initial nine performances.

  Only the year before, Jules Feiffer introduced the word “shit” to Broadway with his comedy Little Murders, where the word was mentioned four times in as many minutes. (And perhaps as a result, Feiffer’s show played only eight performances before closing. In London, the Lord Chamberlain made him change the word “shit” to “dog crap,” which Feiffer found “infinitely more vulgar.”)

  More than uttering the word “fuck” a lot, the characters in The Boys in the Band broke ground in that they presented their sexual orientation as a given, and not something to be cured or revealed as a secret to titillate the audience. It’s what distinguished it from The Killing of Sister George, by Frank Marcus, and A Patriot for Me, by John Osborne, both of which had run into censorship problems in their home country of Britain.

  Most people involved with The Boys in the Band doubted it would ever resurface on Broadway or Off Broadway in a full-blown commercial production. As the show’s set designer, Peter Harvey, put it, “I’m sure everyone gay in New York will come, and when they’ve seen it we’ll close it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Spring 1968, Partners

  A few dozen blocks uptown, the powers behind the new Off-Broadway musical Hair had already decided to make the jump to Broadway.

  Mart Crowley knew James Rado. They’d been classmates at American University in Washington, D.C. “Even in college he had a hair fetish,” said Crowley, referring to Rado’s premature toupee. Ironically, Rado and his lover, Gerome Ragni, had conceived this new stage musical called Hair, and could not wait to add all the freethinking, mind-expanding elements to the upcoming Broadway production that impresario Joseph Papp wouldn’t permit when the musical opened downtown the previous October at the brand-new Public Theater. Top of their list was the song “Sodomy,” which went on blasphemously to declare the joys of fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty, and masturbation.

  Ragni and Rado were on something of a mission. “We thought people should know those words, that it was a gift to the people to know these words about human sexual practices,” said Rado.

  That gift also included naked bodies onstage, in other words, a nude scene. “Joe wouldn’t allow it,” said the show’s composer, Galt MacDermot. “ ‘Sodomy’ was not in the Joe Papp version, neither was ‘Black Boys.’ That’s why Jerry and Jim wanted Tom O’Horgan to direct. Tom was much more the troublemaker, a controversial director. Jim and Jerry knew they could do almost anything with Tom, and they did,” said MacDermot.

  In one altercation with the boss at the newly formed Public Theater, Rado and Ragni had sent Papp a long memo of complaints about the nascent Off-Broadway production of Hair, which, being the theater’s inaugural show, had much riding on it. Even though Papp’s office was only a few yards away, an assistant returned to the rehearsal space, asking, “Who’s Rado and Ragni?”

  When the two men nodded, Papp’s assistant promptly dropped several torn bits of paper on the floor in front of them. It was their memo.

  How dare he? Hair, in Rado and Ragni’s opinion, was their show. They’d conceived the story about a bunch of free-love hippies who burn their draft cards; they’d written the book and lyrics, and felt they had every right to have veto power over Papp’s director of choice, Gerald Freedman, who’d not only turned Hair into a shrill antiwar screed but fired Rado from starring with his lover Ragni in the Off-Broadway production.

  After Hair played a couple of months at the Public, Papp didn’t so much lose interest in the musical when it closed on schedule as he became more interested in other projects, like his own production of Hamlet, which he directed. As he explained the situation to Rado and Ragni, “We do shows for eight weeks only.”

  The Hair story might have ended after its first eight weeks of performances, the victim of Papp’s Shakespeare ambitions, if not for another would-be impresario, in this case a political dilettante with showbiz ambitions. For the handsome scion of Chicago’s J. W. Butler Paper Company, it was a question of what came first, the U.S. Senate or Broadway. Hair, with its liberal political bent, made the choice an obvious one for Michael Butler. He promptly acquired the Broadway rights to the show and immediately found himself more in synch with Rado and Ragni than with Papp and Freedman. Did it matter that he’d never produced a Broadway show? He’d never run for the U.S. Senate either.

  Butler agreed completely with the Hair writers’ complaints about the Off-Broadway production. “I had questions about Gerald Freedman, because he never had smoked grass,” said Butler. Equally important, “I wanted Jim Rado back in the show. His relationship with Jerry, their energy, was at the core of the show.” And he liked Rado and Ragni’s original choice for director.

  Tom O’Horgan, known as the Busby Berkeley of the acid set, came out of the burgeoning Off-Off-Broadway scene, where he immediately made waves by staging The Maids the way its author, Jean Genet, intended it to be performed: in drag with men playing the female roles. Rado and Ragni were impressed, and they also loved his production of Rochelle Owens’s play Futz!, about a farm boy who falls in love with a pig.

  O’Horgan knew just what to do with Hair: Add all the songs that Papp and Freedman found offensive. Also, “We were looking for the real thing, but the kids who did it at the Public were like glossy print kids—regular kids that they dressed up like hippies,” said O’Horgan. “It was pretty awful.”

  He instead cast a lot of real hippies, culled from various East Village haunts. They weren’t easy to find. “Frustration was so high we had taken to chasing anyone down the street who vaguely looked
right,” said O’Horgan. His original concept was for the actor-hippies to live in Broadway’s Biltmore Theatre, which would have forced theatergoers to walk through their laundry, clutter, and garbage in order to find their seats.

  “That was one of Tom’s major things, he wanted to make it an environmental theater piece, like people were living in the theater,” said Marc Cohen, a longtime friend and professional associate. “He wasn’t able to do that, but otherwise he thought he got pretty much what he wanted with Hair.”

  Various city and union laws ruled out O’Horgan’s environmentalism. He lost that battle, but with Papp and Freedman out of the way, there was no resistance to O’Horgan’s giving Broadway its first nude scene—or, more accurately, Broadway’s first group nude scene.

  The nudity wasn’t something Rado and Ragni dreamed up on an acid trip. In March 1967, they’d seen a couple of men strip naked during a be-in that brought ten thousand people into Central Park. Rado recalled, “These two guys in the midst took their clothes off, and everybody was just amazed and astounded, just like an audience. It sent them into this incredible place they had never been before.” Undercover cops in the park alerted officers on horses, and suddenly the Sheep Meadow looked as though it was being overrun by a cavalry of men in blue. The two naked men escaped, never to be arrested, as the crowd began to chant, “We love cops! We love cops!”

  “It was the perfect hippie happening,” said Rado, “and we felt it had to be in the play.”

  So did O’Horgan. Rehearsals for the Broadway version of Hair were, for a while, a total meeting of four minds: O’Horgan’s, Butler’s, Rado’s, and Ragni’s.

  “Galt MacDermot didn’t fit in. He did his job. He didn’t hang out,” said Butler.

  MacDermot agreed with that assessment. “I didn’t find them far-out,” he said of his Hair cohorts. But they were different.

  Rado and Ragni, who had recently split with wife Stephanie, were lovers who lived in Hoboken. MacDermot had a wife and four kids in Staten Island. Rado and Ragni dressed like hippies and had long hair, although the balding Rado usually wore a wig. MacDermot kept his hair short, and he even wore a business suit and tie when Rado and Ragni took him to the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park to research the hippie scene. The park’s denizens, camped out in tents among the crumbling brownstones, thought he was a narc. Despite his crewcut and crisp white shirts, MacDermot wrote music incredibly well and he wrote it fast—so fast that, even though he polished off his initial batch of fifteen Hair songs in just two weeks, he didn’t play them publicly for another two weeks, in case anybody got the impression that he’d cranked them out in only two weeks.

  Rado and Ragni never talked publicly about being gay. Even decades later, Rado would prefer to use words like “pansexuality” and “omnisexual” to describe himself. Those words also described Hair, he said, “which is about the idea of a close friendship, a male bond, a strong male bond in which love happens. That was the thing going for it, that outward love and being unafraid to embrace and be free. In that sense, we reflected that ourselves. We went with those feelings, that was the core of the piece. One thing that came through during the hippie movement was actual physical contact between men. You see that now, but you never did before—at least not in America—until the hippies started doing it.”

  For Rado and Ragni, the musical’s basic triangle of three men—the renegade Berger, the draftee Claude, and the openly bisexual Woof (“I wouldn’t kick Mick Jagger out of bed”)—might have looked like merely a tribe thing, as Rado also termed it. “With all people in the tribe, there was affection and physicality,” he said.

  To Hair’s choreographer, Julie Arenal, the tribe looked more like just a guy thing. The lone woman on the show’s creative team, Arenal complained that the show’s principal female characters—the free-loving Sheila and the already pregnant doormat Jeanie—were in danger of becoming minor distractions to the main event of the three men’s free-roaming love affair.

  It was an example of art imitating life and vice versa.

  “Working on Hair was a very guy situation,” said Arenal. She also called it a very delicate situation, working with the three men. “They weren’t militant. It’s just that they liked the boys. They had a good time together. It’s what they preferred. It wasn’t a statement.

  “Ragni and Rado were like any couple,” Arenal continued. “They fought. They didn’t fight.”

  O’Horgan was a bit more complicated. Back then, “Tom was very secretive about himself,” said Marc Cohen. “He was more like a straight man who liked young guys. He wasn’t very overt about it. He expressed his sexuality through his theater.”

  It was Michael Butler’s opinion that Ragni and Rado were essentially writing about themselves, with the charismatic leader Berger being Ragni and the middle-class Claude being Rado. It’s the major reason why, unlike director Gerald Freedman, Butler wanted Rado to costar with Ragni in the show when they took it to Broadway. “They were lovers,” he said. “Their chemistry had a very strong effect on the show. Jim was a lost child following this crazy man. Ragni was wild, very difficult to deal with. Jim was the reverse. They were essentially playing themselves onstage.”

  In rehearsals, however, Arenal found the show oddly off balance. At one point, she dared to ask O’Horgan, “Why aren’t the girls onstage? Are there no girls?”

  Which is what made it a delicate situation.

  Only twenty-seven years old, Arenal was the youngest and least experienced theater professional of the group. Even though Rado and Ragni were playing young hippies, they both now lived on the dark side of thirty and routinely shaved a few years off their respective ages in order to observe the era’s “don’t trust anyone over thirty” credo. The very petite Arenal was the only one who looked like a teenager, and it was her opinion that the forty-four-year-old O’Horgan had hired her at Ragni’s insistence—she and the writer-actor used to hang out together at a coffeehouse on Tenth Street and Second Avenue—and, more important, “I was the least threatening, hadn’t done much, and O’Horgan didn’t want anyone who had a huge presence,” she said.

  O’Horgan also didn’t want to give Arenal any credit for choreographing Hair. Thanks to Galt MacDermot and the choreographers’ guild, she eventually got credit. It wasn’t so much their heterosexuality as their sobriety that bonded Arenal and MacDermot. “It was crazy backstage,” she recalled. “They did everything. That’s why I became friendly with Galt. We were the only ones who didn’t do drugs.”

  Michael Butler had hired Dr. John Bishop, the erstwhile physician of LSD advocate Timothy Leary, to administer vitamin injections to his company. Even before the show opened on Broadway, there were suspicions among the cast that those shots contained something more than just B12. At one early preview, after Dr. Bishop had made his rounds at the theater, Arenal noticed that a lot of the actors were “spaced-out. It was the worst preview.”

  Cast member Marjorie LiPari sampled Bishop’s brew three times, then stopped. “You tasted the Vitamin B12 mode in your mouth instantly,” she said, “and then you felt the speed mode. And when you crashed, you got a bit of depression.”

  Given the cast’s amphetamine intake, their long hair and hippie clothes, their four-letter-word language, and the show’s two male leads being openly in love backstage, it wasn’t surprising that some people would take offense.

  “The stagehands hated us,” said Arenal. The middle-aged stagehands from Jersey wished they were employed in Eydie Gorme’s and Steve Lawrence’s new musical, Golden Rainbow, about normal people who worked in Las Vegas casinos. Instead, they had to watch night after night as a bunch of dirty longhairs burned their draft cards, yelled obscenities, and got naked.

  And it only got worse when it came to getting naked. In the beginning, O’Horgan considered having the cast wear body stockings for the nude scene, but costume designer Nancy Potts advised against it. He did, however, make it voluntary for the actors to participate in the nude scene at t
he end of act one. “Only a few did it at first, three or four guys and girls. Then most everybody did it,” Galt MacDermot noted.

  At the very first preview, on April 11, only three cast members disrobed—Ragni, Steve Curry (who played Woof) and Steve Gamet, a member of the tribe—and even they were law-bound. Nudity on the New York stage was legal only if the naked actors did not move. That very first night, the three daring young men of Hair took off their clothes under a slitted scrim and then rose up through the scrim’s openings, their naked limbs bathed in a rather dim overhead lighting. The whole scene lasted about twenty seconds. Lighting designer Jules Fisher called the low wattage “a totally artistic decision. The brightness level was related to what was right emotionally at that moment, not to public mores.”

  Although O’Horgan had discussed the possibility of doing a nude scene with the cast, he never rehearsed it. When Ragni, Curry, and Gamet disrobed at the first preview, “[e]veryone was momentarily shocked,” reported cast member Lorrie Davis. “They never did it at rehearsals.”

  In following previews, two other cast members joined the original three and stripped, but Michael Butler worried that the nude scene looked underpopulated, and talked about hiring ringers. “At first I was apprehensive about doing the nude scene,” said cast member Erroll Booker. His hesitance had as much to do with exposure as the effect of Dr. Bishop’s injections on his physical appearance. “The shots ‘shriveled up my member,’ as they say in Victorian novels. Not only mine, but you’d see all the dudes under the scrim pulling at their own, trying to straighten them out.”

  By opening night, more actors consented to strip, and in time, it was not uncommon for various members of the ensemble to jockey for optimum exposure at the front of the tribe. “Many of the girls were so anxious to strip they didn’t even take time off while they were menstruating, and we and the audience were treated to the sight of hanging tampon strings,” reported Lorrie Davis.