by Patti Lupone
AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!
The company went running—back to their rooms, under stairwells, out of the door—laughing and crying and in shock. John loved it. I can still see the entire scene and his penis. There was not a mention of the event until days later when John was giving us a lecture on something. He stopped midsentence and said, “I’m surprised to see you all wearing clothes.”
Momentous event #2. The crabs … someone in the company got crabs. We never found out who the culprit was. Well, who’s going to fess up to that? All of our costumes hung on racks. The crabs infiltrated the costumes and stayed in “residence” with us for the entire month. They wouldn’t leave. They just loved the smell and sweat of Shakespearean and Chekhovian costumes. No matter how much we washed with the goo they put in all of the showers with instructions and warnings, we couldn’t get rid of the crabs. The crabs were a communal problem. We all got closer.
This was also the year that I was given the name Flannel Mouth. It was the final dress rehearsal on our opening night of The Three Sisters. We were rehearsing the third act and I played Irina. I was crying in my speech. During the rehearsal, I saw John pacing at the back of the house, with Margot Harley, our co-producer, and Liz Smith, our voice teacher, trying to pacify him. A few hours later, places for the company was called. I began to walk to the stage in my virginal white costume. On the way out of the dressing room I said, “Hello, Mr. Houseman.” He grabbed me by the throat, started shaking me furiously, and said, “I want to beat you black and blue until you are bloody with bandages all over your face.” What the hell? It turned out that in rehearsal he couldn’t understand what I was saying through my crying, and Margot and Liz wouldn’t let him speak to me. All he could do was unleash his frustration on me at the places call, anointing me Flannel Mouth. Apparently my teachers enjoyed choking me. First Edith Skinner, now John. What a bunch of sadists. I started to take my diction problem somewhat seriously before they killed me.
The Acting Company in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, 1973.
ESTATE OF DIANE GORODNITZKI
The second season at Saratoga was successful. Then we hit the road, but built into our touring schedule was our return to New York City and our official Broadway debut in December/January 1974 at the Billy Rose Theatre. The plays for our Saratoga and Broadway seasons were Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, The Three Sisters, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and James Saunders’s Next Time I’ll Sing to You. I received good notices. Douglas Watt of the Daily News called my comedy “smart.” Those words were music to my ears. A New York critic thought I was smart! We finished our Broadway season and hit the road again.
The Acting Company was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and we played mostly universities. The NEA gave money to the schools and the schools would choose their desired art form. In our second year, our tour expanded throughout the Midwest. On the bus for hours and after long stretches of highway with nothing but fields and cows and flat, flat land, we would stop at these super-sized Holiday Inns, the likes of which I had never seen before. The lobbies resembled the deck of a ship. You could shop for anything—food, clothes, tires, and diesel oil all in one store just left of the front desk. There might be a shuffleboard court or an Olympic-size swimming pool in the lobby. These places were gigantic and so much fun. I remember two of the Holiday Inns—one where we adopted a dog who was stranded on the meridian of the highway. We named him Scapin. Kevin and I brought him to our room and bathed him. We took him to the vet and gave him a start in life. We cared for him for a week but then had to let him go. It broke my heart. We left him in the hotel kennel and told the front desk about him, but I’ll never know if Scapin enjoyed a long and happy life. Our company manager wouldn’t let us keep him, the bitch (the company manager, not the dog). We sought revenge. The bitch stood four foot seven inches in high heels. Our fantasy was to lengthen her clothes and put oversized furniture in her motel room. We never did get our revenge. She left us, and our next company manager’s last name sounded like a sexual disease. Our company managers remained unpopular.
The other Holiday Inn was in North Platte, Nebraska. We were traveling to a theatre in Alliance, Nebraska. It was winter and a snow shower was threatening to turn into a blizzard. The state troopers stopped our bus at the Holiday Inn. We would have to stay the night, but not before someone on the bus came up with the brainstorm of “ghosting.” One person checked in and three others snuck into the room. We could cheat the hotel and save a lot of money was the thinking. The rooms had double beds, so we all slept together. No big deal. We took “group grope” at Juilliard. We were very lucky at this Holiday Inn because we were one of the first arrivals. By the end of the night there were no more rooms left and people had to sleep on the floor of the lobby. We were there for three days and the inn ran out of everything, but we had so much fun—snowball fights during the blizzard, swimming in the pool again during the blizzard, watching TV, shopping in the anything-you-can-buy store just left of the lobby (we spent hours in there). It was first-class entertainment for endless hours. The downside was the loss of the date. If we didn’t play, we didn’t get paid. We didn’t play. Oh, well. When you’re young, things like not getting paid don’t seem to matter as much as they do now. Much like manners and diplomacy.
In our third year we didn’t come into New York, I don’t know why, but we continued expanding our tours to now include the South and the West. We passed through Toad Suck Ferry to get to Conway, Arkansas, where we played The Three Sisters. I remember thinking, Why do we play Chekhov in these Podunk towns? But that night the audience knew the play as well if not better than we did. This audience had such a keen desire to see the play that they prepared for it. I underestimated their longing for Anton Chekhov. Another lesson: Never underestimate your audience.
Kevin and me as Macheath and Lucy Lockit in
The Beggar’s Opera, 1973.
ESTATE OF DIANE GORODNITZKI
Kevin took a year off from the company. I was alone on the road. One night in Akron, Ohio, over the phone, he told me he loved me. I felt dizzy and asked him to repeat what he said. He did. I thought we were in love, but they were words he had never spoken before. It was almost too late for me. I had gone through so much with him and this love was deeply painful as well as ecstatic.… I had been trying to wean myself off of Kevin, but I dug in and gave us another try.
In our fourth year we, as an ensemble, started to meditate. A new face joined the company, Jack O’Brien, who would later go on to win multiple Tony Awards for directing, among other things, Hairspray and The Coast of Utopia. He came on the bus, gave a bit of a speech, and then wrapped it up by declaring, “I’m just a Broadway baby!” We really didn’t know what to make of that comment or him.
Jack felt that to keep the ensemble tuned up and tuned in, we should meditate. We all went to the Transcendental Meditation Center in New York, paid our hundred dollars, got a lecture about meditation and its sixteen thousand mantras, instructions on how to meditate, and an individual mantra—or so we thought. Back on the road we were in L.A. at an amusement park on a day off. Sam and Ben Hendrickson were on the loop de loop. Sam said, “I think I’m going to throw up.”
Ben freaked and said, “No, no, don’t throw up in this little car, all over me. Think of your mantra! ‘Shering, shering.’ ”
Kitty Duval in The Time of Your Life, 1974.
ESTATE OF DIANE GORODNITZKI
Sam stared at him in disbelief. “Shering? That’s MY mantraaAAAAAHHH,” and spewed all over Ben.
We found out that the center had given us only two mantras for twenty-one actors. That was officially the end of the bus rides where we all had to shut up because one of us thought it was time for all of us to meditate.
Jack directed some of our most successful productions. The Time of Your Life was one of them. We were in St. Joe, Missouri, performing the play when we started to get heckled by some kids sitting in the first couple of rows. The gay boys
were targeted, but it seemed more like there was nothing better to do on a Saturday night in St. Joe, Missouri. These kids bought tickets to taunt the actors. I thought a couple of our men were going to jump off the stage and a fight would ensue, but the hecklers were moved to the back of the theatre by the theatre management. They continued to heckle and no one in the audience could do anything about it. It was bizarre—a group of kids terrorizing the theatre audience and the audience being held hostage. We got on the bus after the show, depressed and asking the question, Where are we and why? The road was wearing us down.
We did return to New York City in October/November of 1975 and played our last season together at the Harkness Theatre. The fourth-year repertoire was William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, The Three Sisters, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second, and Alfred Uhry and Robert Waldman’s musical The Robber Bridegroom. It was a typical season for The Acting Company—you either loved us or you hated us. The Robber Bridegroom gave me some of the sweetest moments I’ve ever spent on a stage, while the three actresses playing the three sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, were booed in one of our curtain calls. As Irina, I was one of the actresses, but I’m positive it was Masha who was getting booed! After our Broadway run, we once again went back out on the road, and as it would turn out, it was the last time. The New York stops were just that—stops on a long tour that took us all over the country. New York City was where we lived and paid taxes, but as members of this company, the bus and motel rooms had become home.
Kevin and me again as Jamie Lockhart and Rosamund Musgrove in The Robber Bridegroom, 1975.
ESTATE OF DIANE GORODNITZKI
One night in Omaha I got a telephone call from Margot Harley. I had just received my first Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, as did Alfred Uhry for Book and Lyrics for The Robber Bridegroom. I was rooming with Mary Lou Rosato. Kevin and I had broken up again (so much for love). I fell backward on the bed and stared at the ceiling. My head was spinning. It was surreal. I was in Omaha, Nebraska, and New York was beckoning. It was a crappy motel room, not an agent’s office or a luxurious hotel. It didn’t make sense and then I wondered how the rest of the company would react. I can’t remember how they reacted. We just continued touring. And that was that. (P.S., I didn’t win the Tony. Kelly Bishop did for A Chorus Line.)
The 1975–76 season was the last year of my association with The Acting Company. When eleven of us quit, the company as I knew it disintegrated. Kevin and I were leaving anyway, but others quit because we had a new associate artistic director who joined us in Lexington, Kentucky, to tell the company that some of them would not be enjoying leading parts anymore. One actor quit. Then another, then three, then five, then eleven said enough is enough. Half of the company walked, some in anger, some in solidarity. After eight years with the same actors, I felt both relief and deep emptiness. Kevin and I returned to New York (we were back together again, oy vey!). I thought about the people I would miss, the parts I wouldn’t play, the plays I would never do, the great summers in Saratoga, the lessons I learned, the laughter … the great peals of belly-shaking laughter. It was finished and I had to start over again.
We were tired of the road, sick of one another, and this experience was truly over. It was eight years later, four years in the Drama Division at Juilliard and four years on the road with The Acting Company. We loved and hated one another. There are actors from those eight years together I don’t ever want to see again. There are people who have stopped talking to me. There are blood friendships. There’s no denying that we all learned monumental lessons. As far as the acting was concerned, we were armed with fifteen years’ experience from four years on the road. We trained daily, and we grew. Some of us have had long careers. Some never went beyond the company. Love relationships formed, broke up, left their lifelong mark. Again, I wouldn’t change one minute of it. When the company dissolved in Lexington, Kentucky, it was traumatic and liberating. That’s where I met David Mamet, who became such an important person in my life that he gets his own chapter. But the next thing that happened was a dream come true with a hefty price tag.
5
The Baker’s Wife, or Hitler’s Road Show
1976
“Meadowlark.”
© MARTHA SWOPE/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
There’s a saying in the theatre that if Hitler were alive today, his punishment should be to send him out on the road with a musical in trouble. The Baker’s Wife would have been the perfect sentence for Adolf. For me personally, it was a devastating experience from the minute I started rehearsals.
The idea came from a 1930s French movie, Marcel Pagnol’s La Femme du Boulanger. In 1976 producer David Merrick was mounting the musical version for Broadway and had lined up some major talent. Because he wanted the same kind of success producer Hal Prince had with Fiddler on the Roof, Merrick hired Joe Stein, who had written the book for Fiddler, to write The Baker’s Wife. Composer Stephen Schwartz was writing the score. Joe Hardy was the director. Jo Mielziner, in what would be his last work before he died, was the set designer. Jennifer Tipton was the lighting designer, and our costumes were designed by Theoni Aldredge. Rumor had it Merrick wanted Zero Mostel to star as Aimable the baker. Zero didn’t do it—maybe he knew something the rest of us didn’t. Our producer got what he thought was the next best thing, Chaim Topol, who had played Tevye in the 1971 film version of Fiddler on the Roof. In this particular case, the space between the best thing and the next best thing could have filled the Grand Canyon.
The Baker’s Wife was my first theatrical venture after I left The Acting Company. It wasn’t the show I thought I was going to do. At the time, John Houseman was getting ready to take The Robber Bridegroom back to Broadway for an extended run. We heard this rumor on the road and wondered if we would be going with it. Our company had already made The Robber Bridegroom a hit during a limited Broadway engagement in October of 1975, and we had been playing it to great success on the road for eight months. It was the most popular show of our 1975–76 season.
In March, months after The Acting Company Broadway run, I was thrilled to be recognized for my work with a Featured Actress Tony nod after we’d done only fourteen performances as part of our repertoire. It was an honor, and in a Broadway first, two siblings were nominated in the same year; my brother Bobby received a Best Featured Actor in a Musical nomination for his portrayal of Zach in A Chorus Line.
Despite the nomination, Mr. Houseman asked me to audition for the second Broadway run. I refused. There’s no way I’m auditioning for a role I was just nominated for, I thought. Moreover, Kevin and I were the only cast members from The Acting Company who were even asked to audition. Everyone else was shut out. I couldn’t believe that our company wasn’t going back to Broadway. However, Kevin swallowed his pride and actually consented to read. Another lesson I learned was that when you swallow your pride, you often choke on it. Kevin didn’t get the part.
The whole thing seemed highly disloyal. Not only were they our producers, they had been our teachers at Juilliard. Now they were turning their backs on the very actors who were in part responsible for this production—and they were negating their training of us. Obviously they didn’t trust us. It was a real slap in the face and a wake-up call. For the new production they had cast Barry Bostwick in Kevin’s part, the robber bridegroom, and now they wanted me to audition with him. I remember that the only thing I would do was stand next to him onstage. What did those geniuses expect to learn? I’m short? He’s tall?
Backstage with Kevin at the Harkness Theatre during The Robber Bridegrooms run in New York, 1975.
Months earlier I had auditioned for The Baker’s Wife on one of The Acting Company’s breaks from touring. I wanted the part of Genevieve, the title role, because of the beautiful song, “Meadowlark.” It was a coveted part, but I didn’t get it—at first. Even though I didn’t get the part, an awareness of the play somehow stayed in the back of my mind. The Acting Company was in residence
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a month. While we were there, Kevin and I were in our hotel room, watching TV, waiting for the evening show, when in my stream of consciousness I thought, Oh, The Baker’s Wife went into rehearsal today. Little did I know that before long The Acting Company would no longer exist as the company I knew and that I would soon be joining the company of The Baker’s Wife.
I had a scheduled meeting with Mr. Houseman—it was always “Mr. Houseman,” I never called him John; he was just too intimidating. A day or two before our meeting, I got a call from Helen Nickerson, the general manager of David Merrick’s production office. “Can you fly out to Los Angeles?” she asked me. “We want you to replace Carole Demas in The Baker’s Wife.”
“Yes,” I told her, “but first I have to cancel an appointment.” I called Mr. Houseman to tell him that I couldn’t make our meeting because I was being flown out to L.A.
“Don’t make any decisions until you talk to me,” he said. Oh, now I’m hot to you because somebody else wants me, I said in my mind. Eventually he did offer me Rosamund, but I didn’t take it. I took the role of Genevieve instead. I made the choice on my agent’s advice. “You’ve already done this,” he said of Bridegroom. “Do something new.”
In the simplest possible terms, the plot of The Baker’s Wife revolves around a young woman named Genevieve and her husband, Aimable the baker. He is older, not sexy, not handsome. She falls for Dominique, a virile young chauffeur, and runs off with him, breaking her husband’s heart so badly that he stops baking bread. Aimable’s melancholy affects the entire town, now breadless. After spending several days with her lover in a hotel, Genevieve begins to understand that she may have made a mistake. The townspeople plead with her to return to her husband. She does. La Femme du Boulanger is a great movie. I wish I could say the same of the musical, The Baker’s Wife.