Patti LuPone

by Patti Lupone

  From that point on, I’ve never backed down from any test or any challenge. But it took everything I had to get through the performance. As soon as I came offstage, a doctor was on hand, and I was diagnosed with a 105-degree fever and the worst case of tonsillitis the doctor had ever seen. They put me in a car with the assistant principal (the one always chasing me down corridors) for the ride back to Northport. I was lying down in the backseat with a paper bag nearby in case I got sick to my stomach, but the irony did not escape me. The biggest success of my life was being shared with the man who didn’t give a shit about our music department and who would’ve expelled me if he could’ve. No Esther Scott, no Philip Caggiano or Suzi Walzer, close classmates, no Bo Whitney, my best friend, who held my hand and supported me all through the concert. Just the assistant principal!

  And though I was on the verge of wretching in the backseat and isolated from the celebration on the bus, I realized this achievement marked the beginning of the ownership of my talent, the responsibility to it and to the path that chose me at four years old.

  2

  The Audition

  NEW YORK CITY, 1968

  The Juilliard School of Music.

  SAMUEL H. GOTTSCHO

  May 6, 1968

  Dear Miss LuPone:

  The scholarship committee of the Drama Division has considered your application for financial aid and will award you a scholarship of $1,200 for the year 1968–69, to be applied against tuition costs. I hope this award will make your attending Juilliard practicable….

  Huh? What? No way … really? Okay, I guess.

  In truth I didn’t want to go to Juilliard. I didn’t want to go to college at all. I’d known since I was four years old what I was going to do with my life, but my mother wanted me to finish my education, which meant college. Bobby, who had attended the Dance Division at Juilliard, told me the school was starting a drama division, so I auditioned to please my mother and brother. The audition took place a year after my graduation from high school. I honestly didn’t care if I got in or not.

  During my senior year of high school, singing had become my main focus. My private voice teacher suggested that I audition for Juilliard’s Preparatory Division, which was designed to train students ages six through eighteen in the various disciplines of music. I auditioned and was accepted. I studied classical singing, technique, and music theory.

  Every Saturday morning I took the Long Island Rail Road from Northport to New York City and then by subway on to Juilliard, which at the time was on West 122nd Street in Harlem. I spent my Saturdays smoking cigarettes on the train. (Remember when you could smoke on trains? Remember when you could smoke?) I then took a voice lesson with a bejangled, bejeweled Marian Mandarin. I didn’t learn anything, but that wasn’t entirely her fault. She was a good teacher, but I didn’t understand her teaching methods. She was one of many singing teachers I didn’t understand. All I did was imitate her vocal quality and technique, never knowing whether the imitation was correct or whether it suited my voice. Her appearance distracted me as well. She was quite a sight for a seventeen-year-old. Her arms were covered in bangles. Her ten fingers had rings on eight of them. Her hair was clipped and pinned on top of her head in a state of confusion, the clips perilously on the verge of flying into my face when she gesticulated. She would look at me confused. I looked back at her even more confused. Clearly, nothing I did captured her imagination, so in my lesson I just imitated her and snuck peeks at the clock, waiting for the hour to end. Juilliard Preparatory got me nowhere except out of Northport on a Saturday. I take that back. I loved music theory and my teacher. However, I wasn’t planning on becoming an opera singer.

  At the end of the year I had to sing in a recital, knowing that my voice wasn’t in the best shape. I truly didn’t realize how poorly I sang until I looked at my mother’s and my brother’s faces afterward. They were embarrassed for me. Then I was embarrassed for me. Still, I didn’t care because I didn’t want to be an opera singer. The Broadway lights were beckoning. However uninspired the preparatory experience was, I let Marian Mandarin convince me to audition for Juilliard’s Opera Department. As far as auditions go, this one was classic. One judge was reading a book, the second judge was filing her nails, the last judge held his head in his hands as he stared at the table. I sang the aria as I watched the totally disinterested panel. I knew my fate, but I didn’t care. I lie. I cared a little because I realized I failed in the audition. No one wants to fail in an audition regardless of whether you want the part or not.

  A year later, auditions for the newly formed Drama Division were being held at the school on 122nd Street—Juilliard was expanding, and a new building at Lincoln Center was under construction. I arrived pretty much hoping for the same fate, which was no admittance to the prestigious school, but I was eager to impress them, anyway. My classical speech was Kate’s epilogue from The Taming of the Shrew. My contemporary monologue was Dolly Levi’s money speech from The Matchmaker. When I finished the classical speech, an older man with a red face and white hair and beard came to the foot of the stage. “I don’t think that’s what Shakespeare had in mind,” he said. It was John Houseman, one half of the artistic directorship of the Drama Division at the Juilliard School. The other half was Michel Saint-Denis, an actor, director, and drama theorist. Among his long list of credits, he co-directed the Royal Shakespeare Company. John Houseman was a prominent producer known most notably for his collaboration with Orson Welles and would become even better known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of Professor Kingsfield in both the movie and television series of The Paper Chase. These men created the Drama Division of the Juilliard School—pretty impressive lineage. However, on that particular day, John Houseman wasn’t quite the intimidating figure he would later come to epitomize. I wasn’t intimidated because I was sure I didn’t care whether I got in or not.

  After I finished my contemporary speech, the Drama Division panel asked me to do an improvisation. From the darkened theatre where they sat, there was a pause … a longish pause. Then someone said, “You’ve just received a rejection letter from the Drama Division of the Juilliard School.” Without thought or preparation I played the scene thus—I walked stage right from where I was standing to an imaginary mailbox. I opened the mailbox with a key, pulled out my mail, flipped through it until I came to “the letter.” I saw the address on the envelope, ripped it open in excitement, and read it … pause … then tossed it over my shoulder and walked away. Big laugh. I got them, I thought. They asked me if I could sing. I ran through a mental list of the songs I knew. Inspiration struck with Comden and Green’s “You Mustn’t Be Discouraged” from Fade Out, Fade In, a humorous salute to the idea that however bad things are, they could always get worse. I opened my mouth and out it came. That was the key that unlocked my admission to the school. They called me off the stage into the house, where they surrounded me. They asked me a lot of questions. The one I remember was, Did I play an instrument? I told them the tuba, which was true, but also funny. I left the audition happy because I didn’t fail … and realized, yes, in fact, I do care whether I got in or not.

  One of the reasons I didn’t want to go to Juilliard was that I was enjoying my newly independent life in New York City.

  Right after graduation from Northport High School, I moved into Manhattan, where I shared a hundred-dollar-a-month sixth-floor walk-up railroad flat with my friend Pam Combs. I found a job right away working at Civic & Co. selling button-down shirts. The owner, Norman Civic, let me take time off for auditions. I was making money. I had a roof over my head. I was auditioning. I’d known pretty much all my life where I would end up—the Broadway Musical Stage—and I was determined to pursue it.

  3

  The Making of an Actor

  JUILLIARD, 1968–1972

  Catherine in A View from the Bridge, 1970.

  ESTATE OF DIANE GORODNITZKI

  So in May 1968, despite my flippant audition, Juilliard admitted me and even gave m
e a scholarship—$1,200 for the first year against tuition costs. The remaining tuition was $350. On the acceptance letter is a handwritten note from John Houseman: “That was a very interesting audition.”

  You never can tell. The less you care, the freer you are.

  That first class of the Drama Division was called Group 1—or as I like to call it, “36 lunatics.” I was among the tamer lunatics in the group. It seems my teachers’ intentions were to take thirty-six of the craziest people they could find across America and train them to become Juilliard actors—actors who would have a very solid technique in vocal production, diction, and acting, and who could play the classics, whether they were American, English, French, or Russian. Crazy, however, was the operative word for my class—and each of us was crazy in our own unique way. Not that the teachers weren’t a little loony themselves. Actually, they were as crazy as we were. We just outnumbered them. On our first day Mr. Houseman assembled the class and famously said to us, “Look to your right, now look to your left. One of you won’t be here next year.” And thus we began our training in the Drama Division of the Juilliard School. Scared? Intimidated? Happy as clams to be there? We didn’t know what hit us from day one.

  We were divided into four sections: A, B, C, and D. There were nine students to a section. I was in Group A. Group D stood for “drugs.” Most of the students who didn’t return for our second year were in that group. The speech and voice departments were headed by Edith Skinner and Elizabeth Smith, respectively. They didn’t much care for me, especially Edith Skinner. She wrote the book Speak with Distinction, which acting schools still use today. Edith was as much of a character as my voice teacher from Juilliard Preparatory was. She’d come to class looking like a Hollywood contract player from the 1940s, in little dresses, bleached hair, and a lot of makeup, some of it smeared. She could pinpoint your hometown within forty miles by listening to your accent. It was her goal to rid the students of their regionalisms and teach them to speak with a mid-Atlantic accent. This class was extremely technical, but Edith lost me that first year when she put her hands around my throat, shook me, and said, “I’m going to make a lady out of you yet.”

  “The bet’s on,” I said to myself.

  In that first year, in one of her classes, she introduced us to the diphthong. After we finished “meeting” the diphthong, she slowly walked to the wall of windows, drew back the curtain, and said, “Well, children, we are freeeeeeee. We are out of the fooorrreeeesssttt. We are saaaiilling on the Hudson River. Sis, boooomm, baaahhhhh.” I thought she’d lost her mind.

  However nuts I thought Edith was, she was a brilliant teacher.

  Our teachers were all brilliant in their way, and they included Michael Kahn, Moni Yakim, Liz Smith, and Marian Seldes. Marian Seldes was my savior at Juilliard. She directed me several times and had an unfailing confidence in my ability. She was also my biggest defender. I was more often than not left off the main stage production cast list. I would be put in a smaller play in a studio, and Marian would more often than not direct that particular production. She accepted my quirkiness and knew how to connect with me so that I would eventually understand her concept and direction of the play. She knew better than most of my teachers how to bring the best out of me. Boris Tumarin, a Russian director, was another teacher able to focus my rambunctious spirit. Both of these people went to bat for me whenever Mr. Houseman had reservations about my involvement in the class.

  Moni Yakim’s class was all about movement, focus, and relaxation. We loved him. In that first year, one of my classmates, Larry Reiman, kind of lost his mind. At the end of class the actors would run in a circle before we lay down on the floor while Moni walked around and touched each of our third eyes. One day while running in the circle, Larry started peeling off his clothes until he was naked. It was a bit disconcerting to the faculty, but it was considered expression, not unexpected or even shocking … except to us. He eventually did lose his mind and vanished from the school, from his apartment, from Manhattan, never to be seen or heard from again, only to appear as a lone figure in a parking lot of a Holiday Inn in Norman, Oklahoma, after we students had become The Acting Company seven years later. We pulled into the Holiday Inn and Mary Lou Rosato screamed at the top of her lungs, “Oh my God! It’s Larry Reiman!” We clambered to the front of the bus, the door opened, and Larry simply said, “Hi, guys. How ya doing?” Larry hung around the company while we were there. When we left he faded back into the void. Years later I ran into a student of Larry’s. He had become a teacher in Norman, I believe. She said, “Was Larry as crazy back then as he is now?”

  I looked at her and had to laugh. “Yes, he was,” I said. Then I asked, “Is he still alive?”

  Anna Sokolow was a modern-dance choreographer and her improvisational dance class was my absolute favorite at school. She was strict, with no sense of humor, but she taught me as much about acting as our bona fide acting teachers. She challenged the surface response, mediocrity, and facility. She made us dig deeper into ourselves, own and externalize our passion. It was a heady class. When Anna joined us we were in our second year of school but our first year in the beautiful new building on West Sixty-sixth Street. Juilliard was now officially part of Lincoln Center, and the north side of the school faced the Chinese embassy. They used to watch us jumping around or crouching in corners or running the length of the room in our black leotards and tights while they were in their Mao Tse-tung uniforms standing against huge picture windows. We would wave to these lifeless figures staring out of their windows. They never waved back. I wondered if they were a wee bit jealous of our uninhibited freedom or if they were secretly planning to obliterate Juilliard and New York City while they were at it. The embassy is now gone. We had an odd communication with those Chinese men. I think we were all very curious about one another.

  In our first year, because the Juilliard building was too small to accommodate the drama department, our classes were held in International House at 500 Riverside Drive. It was graduate student housing. René Auberjonois was one of our acting teachers. In the vast auditorium of International House, René gave us his philosophy of acting—“Acting is fucking.” Right after he said that, he left the school to play Father Mulcahy in the movie M*A*S*H. We were a bunch of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids—how were we supposed to apply this insight, let alone understand its deepest meaning?

  Our teachers leaving us in the middle of our studies happened often. Many were working actors who taught until they were cast in their next role. In the middle of teaching us what their theory of acting was, they would get a job and leave us standing there. Then another teacher would take over and say, “Well, ignore that. This is what acting is.” Huh? Wha?

  Michael Kahn’s acting class was the scariest. He was so brilliant and had a razor-edge delivery. He could and invariably did destroy each and every one of the actors that first year. He was as challenging and uncompromising as Anna was. The difference was we were there to learn how to act, not how to dance, so his class was the most intense of all. If he didn’t believe the actor or if he felt we weren’t committed, there would be a bloody showdown. He was always right, but in my case he was too intimidating for me to hear what he had to say. Sometimes the very brilliant ones are the least accessible. Michael is a staggeringly good director and he was a great acting teacher, but I was totally scared of him and wasted too much energy being scared, so I can’t remember what he taught me. I was just so overwhelmed with fear at school.

  There was absolutely no consistency of acting training in those first couple of years. By default we were left to our own devices to put the pieces together. I finally realized that there was no one technique to acting—you have to apply what works in whatever situation you’re in. Learn the techniques and use them all. Ultimately it was the smartest way to teach a young actor, but they didn’t know that because the department was still forming. We were the experiment, and it was, for the most part, a glorious train wreck. It was always inte
resting, somewhat strange, startling, and combative. The most brilliant of the actors did not make it through the first year. The training and the psychological breaking down of our individualism to form “the Juilliard Actor” was brutal. I was in tears every night. I was not one of the favorites. John Houseman once called me into his office and said, “You and Miss Nichols do more acting in the cafeteria than you do in class.” Nancy Nichols got the leads, though. I just got punished. He also humiliated me in an elevator full of people. I got in and Mr. Houseman was already there. “Hi, Mr. Houseman,” I said.

  “Louise Bernikow says you are the most illiterate person she has ever met,” he responded.

  She should get out more, I thought. Well, it was probably true, but come on. I was so embarrassed in front of all those mini-geniuses clutching their cellos and oboes. I said nothing, buried my head, and hated him a little.

  At one point they wanted to throw me out of the school. They didn’t like my personality. But they couldn’t throw me out just because they didn’t like me, so they threw a lot of different roles in my direction to see if I might fail as an actor. Instead, the Drama Division actually made me a versatile actor. The school pretty much pigeonholed the actors—leading lady, soubrette, ingenue, character woman—but I played such a variety of roles and ages that I was made incredibly strong and pliable over the four years. I became an example at school. If there was a recalcitrant student who showed promise but was on her way out the door, Suria Saint-Denis, Michel’s widow, would say, “Remember Patti LuPone.”

  John Houseman’s favorite actresses were the tall women with high cheekbones—these were the actresses who got the leads on the main stage. He actually told me that I was too short to be a leading lady … while I was playing one. I did The Maids and Next Time I’ll Sing to You, two of my most successful productions, in Room 306 at the new school. For the most part that studio was my stage for my remaining three years at Juilliard. It always hurt to be left off the cast list of the main stage production. However, I found ways to ease the pain.