by John Lithgow
“And they would go EEN! And they would come OUT!” José cried. “And each had their NEEEDZ and their PERVERSIONZZ!”
All of us sat there transfixed. Reaching a climax, he grabbed a ten-dollar bill from his pocket and thrust it into Liv’s hand.
“THERE!” he roared. “You are MINE. I have BOUGHT you!”
He proceeded to push and tug her around the room. Finally he thrust her in a corner where she cowered near tears.
“NOW,” he ordered at last, looming over her. “Start the scene AGAIN!”
When José directed the moment with Mat’s dead mother’s crucifix, he unleashed another of his inspirational perorations on me. At its height he tore a chain from around his neck. On it hung a crucifix. With tears in his eyes he told me that it was his mother’s crucifix, which she’d given him before she died. Just like Mat’s mother, she had begged José to always wear it. He snatched my prop crucifix from me and strung his mother’s around my neck. He told me to repeat the scene, armed with this sacred talisman. Maybe the crucifix worked a little magic. Maybe the scene played a little better the next time through. But José’s mischievous partner, Nick, told me later in confidence that José’s mother was still alive, happy, and well. She was living in the comfortable house José had bought for her back in Panama City.
“And, by the way,” Nick added, “that crucifix doesn’t belong to him.”
Anna Christie was hardly my finest hour. Nor Liv’s. Nor José’s, for that matter. And it is curiously absent from most of our résumés. The play is ungainly and long, and our leaden production didn’t do much to help it out. Liv was a little too stately for her part, and no one would ever mistake me for a coal stoker (Times critic Walter Kerr was right when he claimed that I played Mat Burke as though I’d “been spun from a children’s merry-go-round”). The performances were exhausting, yet they rarely earned us more than a tepid response from the crowds. Indeed, the most memorable moment of our run was on one sultry July night when the massive 1977 East Coast blackout struck in the middle of one of my interminable Act III speeches. I suspect that a lot of people in the audience that evening were hugely relieved that the show came down an hour early. But if the show was far less than triumphant, there was one major compensation. The experience of working with José Quintero, that big-hearted, larger-than-life, pounding steam engine of human emotion, did not completely make up for those six months of depletion and disappointment. But it helped.
There is a number missing from my 1970s Broadway scorecard. That number is zero. Zero musicals. I performed in not a single production of a Broadway musical in that entire decade. In fact, I learned early on that the worlds of “legit” and “musical” theater on Broadway are virtually two separate professions. The people from those two different worlds rarely even know each other. I had done lots of light opera in my college days, and a few musicals in summer stock. But my singing and dancing skills had little to recommend them besides their slap-happy enthusiasm. I couldn’t possibly measure up to the hundreds of amazingly talented song-and-dance performers who fiercely competed every day for the minuscule number of musical-theater jobs in and out of town.
But, to my amazement, the undisputed king of Broadway director-choreographers took an interest in me. Bob Fosse always loved to get his thoroughbred singer-dancers to act. In my case, he seemed intent on getting an actor to sing and dance. When he was casting the new Kander and Ebb musical Chicago, he called me in to audition. He had me in mind for the role of Amos, the hapless cuckold best remembered for his melancholy song “Mr. Cellophane.” Through my agent I was told to learn Bert Williams’ classic ballad “Nobody” and to come in and sing it for Bob Fosse. I worked my head off with a coach, came to my audition, and sang my heart out for Bobby.
Bob Fosse was a small man. He was pale, wiry, and balding, with the fidgety fixity of a mongoose. He wore a signature uniform of black jeans, black dance shoes, and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. He appeared to have a half-smoked cigarette permanently affixed to the corner of his mouth. Curiously, for an ex-dancer his posture was not great. Although he was always grimly focused on the job at hand, his gray eyes twinkled with mischief and he loved everything about show business. My audition seemed to charge him with excitement. After my song, he had me read a speech written for the lead role of Billy Flynn, the razzle-dazzle trial lawyer. He brought me back two more times in the coming weeks, shifting me back and forth between Billy and Amos, two vastly different characters. I was not really right for either role, but Bob seemed restless and frustrated that he couldn’t squeeze me into either one. Soon afterwards, Jerry Orbach was aptly cast as Billy Flynn and Barney Martin as Amos. I was neither surprised nor disappointed. I’d gotten a lot further than I’d expected. I’d had two callbacks for a big Broadway musical. I’d had my Bob Fosse moment. That was enough for me.
But as it turned out, all those auditions ended up landing me a Bob Fosse job after all. Four years later, Bob was halfway through the murderously difficult shooting period for his autobiographical movie All That Jazz. The film was loosely based on the creation of Chicago all those years before. In the movie, Roy Scheider plays a character that unmistakably represents Bob himself. During the rehearsals for Chicago Bob had suffered a massive heart attack that stopped production for a period of months. An identical episode is the central crisis of All That Jazz. In the script of the film, when production is suspended the producers go to a rival director to take over the show. For this role Bob had cast an actual director, filmmaker Sidney Lumet. When the film’s shooting schedule ran over, Lumet was forced to pull out for another project. Bob had to find a replacement fast. He thought of me. He called up and asked me to play the part, as if he were politely asking me for a favor. I couldn’t say yes fast enough.
And so it was that in 1978 I finally crossed the line that separated legit and musical theater in New York. Ironically enough, I did it in a movie. My role was actually featured in only two dialogue scenes, tart but brief. As the rival director in the script, I was clearly the embodiment of all of Bob’s Broadway nemeses—Hal Prince, Michael Bennett, Gower Champion, et al. He directed the scenes with relaxed, sardonic humor, and with the offhand precision of a choreographic taskmaster. My cynical little role was acid fun, but the real joy of doing All That Jazz lay elsewhere. I appeared in a huge production number that came at the very end of the film. I was nothing more than a glorified extra in the sequence—one of a dozen minor characters from the film who sit in the audience of a hallucinatory rock concert. The concert features Roy Scheider and Ben Vereen belting out “Bye Bye Life” to herald the death of Scheider’s character. For nine days of shooting, I saw Bob Fosse indefatigably at work. I saw Ben Vereen, Ann Reinking, and Kathy Dobie hurl themselves into his athletic choreography, duplicating every move and gesture, through at least fifty angles and at least three hundred takes. I never saw a trace of nerves, fatigue, or bad humor from any of them. There was just strength, concentration, commitment, and talent. In those nine days, the musical gang put the legit gang to shame.
Twenty years later, in 2002, I did my first Broadway musical. Three years after that, I did my second. Taken together, I played about six hundred performances. I never missed a single show. I was nominated for two Tony Awards for Best Actor in a Musical. I even won one of them. But I had watched Bob Fosse direct his thoroughbreds through nine days of shooting on All That Jazz. In six hundred shows I never quite got over the nagging feeling that, as a song-and-dance man in the Broadway musical theater, I was a total fraud.
In the mid-1970s, a friend from my Harvard days wrote a play. The Manhattan Theatre Club organized a first reading of the play in its old theater on the Upper East Side. As a favor to my friend, I showed up to read one of the parts. The play’s milieu was trailer-trash Appalachia. I dimly recall that the plot involved an episode of hostage-taking and the siege of a rural shack. Beyond that, I remember almost nothing about the reading. I might have forgotten it altogether
if it weren’t for a young actress in the cast that day. She was a pale, wispy girl with long, straight, cornsilk hair. She appeared to be in her late teens. She was so shy, withdrawn, and self-effacing that I couldn’t decide whether she was pretty or plain. The only time I heard her voice was when she spoke her lines. She had a high, thin voice and a twangy hillbilly accent. She was so lacking in theatrical airs that I surmised that perhaps she wasn’t an actress at all. Maybe she was the real thing. Maybe the play was even based on her own story. Maybe the playwright had brought her in for the occasion, from Kentucky or West Virginia. Certainly her performance in the reading provided the only authentic moments of the entire afternoon.
The young woman had a strange name. How could she possibly be an actress, I wondered, with a name like that?
Imagine my amazement a few months later when this same young woman showed up for the first day of rehearsal for Trelawny of the “Wells” at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. Joe Papp had hired us both to join the play’s cast of eighteen. That pale waif with the lank yellow hair had landed her first job in New York theater, just weeks after getting her degree from the Yale School of Drama. Since I’d first laid eyes on her, she had utterly transformed herself. Mingling with a cast of strangers, she was vibrant, animated, and radiantly beautiful. You would never know from looking at her that this was her first professional gig. I was floored. I’d been watching actors act my whole life. I wasn’t easily taken in. But when I’d mistaken her for a hayseed hillbilly at that play reading a few months before, either I had been a myopic fool or this young woman was a brilliant actress.
In the coming weeks, she was a joy to work with. Joy, in fact, defined the entire experience of Trelawny of the “Wells.” The play is a late-nineteenth-century romance by Arthur Wing Pinero about a theater troupe based at the fictional Wells Theatre in London. The Lincoln Center production was my second time around with the play, having done it at Long Wharf a few years before in a different role. It is arguably the best play ever written about the intoxicating allure of the stage. The passionate thespians in Trelawny are breathless with the high seriousness, reckless folly, and occasional heartbreak of the acting profession. Because they are enacting their own stories, actors always love performing the play (possibly more than audiences love watching it). The shared affection of the onstage troupe always spills over into their offstage lives. This was certainly true of our Lincoln Center production. It was delirious fun. The magic of theater floated down on us like fairy dust. We all fell in love with each other. The superb cast assembled by director A. J. Antoon included Walter Abel, Aline McMahon, Mary Beth Hurt, Michael Tucker, and, in another professional debut, the very young Mandy Patinkin. In the midst of all this luminous talent, that fresh-faced Yale grad with the funny name more than held her own. In the fairly thankless role of Imogen Parrott, the Wells’ hard-boiled leading lady, she lit up the stage. Everyone in the show sensed that she was destined to do great things.
Later that year, I was hired to direct a comedy revival for the Phoenix Theatre, yet another nonprofit rep theater based in Manhattan. It was to be one of four American offerings in a season intended to celebrate the American bicentennial. Of the three other shows being produced, one was an evening of two one-acts that included Tennessee Williams’ 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. This was the three-character play from 1955 that eventually evolved into the notorious film Baby Doll. The one-act was to be directed by my old Long Wharf boss Arvin Brown. He needed to find a sensational young actress to play the bravura role of the voluptuous, dim-witted Baby Doll. Word had gotten around about the terrific young Yale Drama School girl who had fared so well in Trelawny of the “Wells” at Lincoln Center. She was called in to read for the part. Since I was one of the four Phoenix directors that season, I was there for her audition. When she walked in, I greeted her warmly, introduced her to the other three directors, then sat down beside them behind a table and witnessed a little piece of theater history.
For her audition she wore a nondescript skirt, blouse, and slip-on shoes. She carried a second pair of shoes and a box of Kleenex. As she made small talk with Arvin about the play and the character, she unpinned her hair, she changed her shoes, she pulled out the shirttails of her blouse, and she began casually stuffing Kleenex into her brassiere, doubling the size of her bust. Reading with an assistant stage manager, she began a scene from 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. You could barely detect the moment when she slipped out of her own character and into the character of Baby Doll, but the transformation was complete and breathtaking. She was funny, sexy, teasing, brainless, vulnerable, and sad, with all the colors shifting like mercury before our eyes. From the first second there was no question that she would be offered the part, so the four of us just sat there and enjoyed her performance. She was hired. She played Baby Doll. She was the talk of the town. She was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actress in a play. This was the first of at least thirty major award nominations she would eventually receive. Nobody would argue with the statement that she is the greatest American actress of the last fifty years.
A moment of history? Of course. It was the last time Meryl Streep had to audition for anything.
Photograph by Van Williams. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor.
Nichols, Quintero, Fosse, and Streep may stand out, but they are only four out of scores of extraordinary figures that dropped in and out of my life during the 1970s. New York was a stricken city in that decade. It was destitute, filthy, and dangerous. Actors, hookers, and muggers peopled the theater district in equal numbers. Dark theaters outnumbered the ones with running shows. Most of my theater friends spent far more time unemployed than employed. Life was not easy for any of us. And yet we all belonged to an intensely active, optimistic, and interdependent community. My tight-knit gang gathered for potluck supper parties, diligently trooped off to see each others’ shows, sang Irish ballads in crowded taverns, and biked furiously through Manhattan traffic as if we owned the town. We shared a sense that we belonged to New York theater and it belonged to us, that in spite of setbacks and struggles we were doing what we’d chosen in our lives, that good things were happening for us, and that we’d all make it in the long run. In that vital community, I had more reason than anyone for optimism and hope. Leaping from one show to the next, season after season, I felt like the luckiest actor in town.
But in this bright picture there were dark shades. For one thing, my parents had entered a period of impermanence and anxiety. My ascendance in the theater profession precisely coincided with my father’s precipitous decline. After his ignominious dismissal from McCarter Theatre he and my mother had spent a forlorn year on that farm outside of Princeton, departing only after my little sister was safely ensconced in college. In the next years, they moved a half dozen times, an itinerary that resembled the wanderings of Odysseus. Duplicating the precarious lifestyle of his younger days, my father pursued one pipe dream after another. He never lost his sunny positivism or his buoyant humor, but with every move his exploits became a little more quixotic. And through it all, with a poignant air of forced cheeriness, my mother remained his most ardent booster.
They first moved to Vermont, where Dad attempted to start a performing arts center in Brattleboro. When that failed, he tried selling Norwegian prefab kit homes to out-of-state buyers. When nothing came of that, Mom persuaded her brother, my wealthy Uncle Bronson, to buy an old Vermont farmhouse and hire Dad to restore it for resale. Next was Tampa, where Dad took a job as an artist-in-residence at the University of South Florida, with my mother on hand as an active faculty spouse. After that, the pair bounced back and forth between my brother’s and my sister’s hometowns of Amherst and Ithaca. During this stretch, Dad undertook his most fanciful project yet. Purely on spec, he created a long epic poem set during the Trojan War, written in the style of Homer’s Iliad. At all of his whistle-stops he landed temp teaching jobs, at schools like Cornell,
U Mass, and Ithaca College, or directed student shows for their undergraduate theater groups. In each of these settings he was a popular and inspiring mentor, beloved by faculties and students alike. But he never stuck around for long.
My folks had reached their seventies by now. Their best days were drifting farther and farther into the past. They began to lose more and more of their old gang, those hard-drinking, hard-smoking bohemians from their younger years. My mother had fewer and fewer friends, and fewer and fewer people were around who remembered my father’s best work. With the burden of old age and nagging insecurity, Dad was growing increasingly fretful and prone to fatigue. But he and my mother kept moving on, moving on. Wanderlust never quite released them from its grip.
Meantime I was acting away on Broadway. I was loving my work, expanding my horizons, and making a bigger and bigger name for myself. But despite the pleasure and pride I took in my fat Broadway résumé, my concern and guilt at my parents’ increasing sense of dislocation weighed me down. Nor was this the only burden I carried during those frenetic years. Onstage I was a confident, respected actor, constantly employed and consistently in demand. But in my offstage existence, things couldn’t have been more different. By the time I reached the end of the 1970s, my personal life had come apart at the seams. All the verities of my first thirty years had utterly failed me. Every time I walked out a stage door I left the warm embrace of the theater and came up against the real world. In that world I was hanging on by a thread.