by Patti Lupone
I arrived in Los Angeles in May of 1976. I walked into a situation I knew nothing about. All I knew was that Carole Demas had been fired, not that the show was in trouble. The situation was not as dysfunctional as it would become, but there was already discomfort because they’d gone through a long rehearsal period, they’d opened to tepid reviews, and the leading lady had been fired. That’s not a good sign.
I joined the cast at the beginning of a very long pre-Broadway run that would go from Los Angeles to San Francisco to St. Louis to Boston to Washington, D.C., before heading to New York. They had just opened in L.A., and the show was sold out for its entire six-week run there—and the Dorothy Chandler is a big house. We had a Civic Light Opera subscription audience, we had Stephen Schwartz, and we had Topol—all of which assured us a sellout.
It didn’t take much to see that the show had problems. Signs of trouble were everywhere, even this early in the run. Carole Demas wasn’t the biggest problem in the show, but of course they shot the messenger. “We’ll fire the leading lady, and everything will be fine.” That was the logic at first.
But things were not fine. There were sparks of tension between David Merrick and Stephen Schwartz about what should be done to make the show better, sparks that regularly detonated in serial dismissals. Heads continued to roll in L.A., the first stop on our tour. In addition to the leading lady, we also lost the orchestrator and the conductor.
The Baker’s Wife was a musical that just didn’t work. Even though we had some of Broadway’s most successful talent, nobody could define what was wrong, and nobody knew how to fix it. We already knew how bad it was in L.A., but that was as good as it would ever get. After that, from one revision to another, from one city to another, it just went downhill. Several actors, sure that the show was doomed, tried to jump ship. Keene Curtis was seen in a phone booth crying, begging Helen Nickerson to release him from his contract, to no avail. We were all trapped in this turkey and we knew it. The fact that we were all trapped in it for six months on the road wore us down.
The book was a problem, but so was everything else. The sets were a problem. The lights were a problem. The costumes were a problem. The orchestrations were a problem. The choreography was a problem. The relationship between Stephen Schwartz and David Merrick was a problem. One constant problem was a song called “Bread,” the big Act I chorus number, which became the Waterloo of the show. Because the cast kept rehearsing different versions of it day after day after day, it became a running joke. Every day, there would be a rehearsal of “Bread.” Every night, the new version would go into the show. The next day, they would change it again. That night that version would go in, and the next day they would change it again, and on and on and on.
We were never out of rehearsal. The show kept deteriorating, and everything they did to change it just made it worse. From the Dorothy Chandler in L.A., we went to the Curran in San Francisco, where we opened to eleven of the most devastating notices I’ve ever seen in my life. No surprise there—we followed A Chorus Line into the Curran Theatre. The Curran was also the first theatre where the ushers took pity on us. They sent us candy backstage; they invited us to go out for drinks. They did anything they could to make us feel better. After that, ushers continued to take pity on us at every stop on our tour. It was as if there was an underground usher gossip mill—each theatre prepared the next for the disaster heading their way.
We played to subscription audiences, so despite the reputation that preceded us, they showed up anyway. Poor suckers. At the curtain call they were kind to the performers, yet baffled at the mess they had just witnessed.
Early in the San Francisco run, our second stop, the cast was told to wait in our dressing rooms after the performance, because David Merrick himself was coming to talk to us. He kept us waiting for almost an hour after the curtain. I had a childhood friend in my dressing room and we had planned to go out for supper. He sat on the floor for two hours, waiting for the meeting to be over. When Mr. Merrick arrived, we were called over the intercom to a darkened stage with just one ghost light illuminated. We huddled together, waiting for the man. As if by magic, he appeared in front of the ghost light, so that he was entirely backlit. All I could see was the dome of his bowler hat atop his blackened silhouette.
He started to talk in gentle, hushed tones, thanking us for all of our hard work on this musical that he was so proud to be producing. He then started to lay out what needed to be done to ensure its Broadway success. He handed out four proposals, A, B, C, and D. I can’t remember what A, B, and C were, but D’s proposal was to continue rehearsing with the following conditions: Drop a city from the tour, return to New York City, and go back into rehearsal for nine weeks with a negotiated salary. Here’s where it gets a little squirrely. If the performance salary for the actor was more than five hundred dollars a week, there would be no rehearsal pay. If the actor made under five hundred a week in performance, the rehearsal pay would be negotiated with the Merrick office. In other words, the star and the principals, who clearly made more than five hundred dollars a week, would go back into rehearsal for nothing; no performance fee and no rehearsal fee. The chorus, you can bet, would make a pittance. Ultimately, Equity gave him two weeks’ rehearsal.
Kurt Peterson as Dominique and me as Genevieve.
© MARTHA SWOPE/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Because the scene onstage that night was so dramatic, and because we were a bit daunted by the fact that Broadway’s Greatest Living Showman had come to address the company in person, we were all in awe of his persuasive oratory. Anything for you, we thought at first, but in the light of day we said, “Whaaaat?!” We realized what David Merrick was asking us to do. We all voted no, which made the entire company shake in fear—the actors said no to the producer. This was only our second stop and we were already outraged and exhausted. As it turned out, for the entire six months of the tour we never stopped rehearsing during the day and performing at night.
Our director, Joe Hardy, got the axe as well. In San Francisco we were director-less, but rehearsals continued. Each day the creators would present changes that were worse than the day before, but they would go in the show that night, anyway. The next day, those changes came out and that night we played the new changes. It was simply a retreading and reshuffling of the existing material. What had been in the second act went into the first act. What had been in the first act went into the second act. Lines that had been spoken by one person were now spoken by a different person. What this person had been singing, now somebody else was singing, or it was cut altogether but then would go back in the next day, with yet somebody else singing it or saying it or moving it. Nothing really significantly changed. And the company was still rehearsing “Bread.” Blessedly I was not in that number.
It seemed that nothing was going right, including the scenery. Jo Mielziner had put our sets on a pair of turntables. On stage left we had the café exterior. When you rotated it, there was the set for the inside of the café. On stage right was the facade of the bakery. After it rotated, the other side came into view, the bakery interior and the bedroom interior upstairs. At the beginning of one performance in San Francisco, I was singing “Gifts of Love” up in the bedroom. I looked to my left to see the entire café spinning like a top. Oh God, I thought to myself, even the scenery has lost its mind. Small wonder I started popping Valium, ten milligrams at a time. What had happened was that the stagehands had wound the turntable too many times in one direction. In order to make it rotate at all, they had to unwind it during the song. It looked as if the café had decided to sing along with me.
Not that there weren’t good times. There were. I was on the road with great people, and we had as much fun as we could under the circumstances. I started hanging out with two guys in the cast, Timmy Jerome and Pierre Epstein, back when we were still in L.A. We’d go to the beach together, have dinner together. They would come to my sweet little apartment in Westwood and I would make them breakfast. They became my pro
tectors, my big brothers. We were the Three Musketeers.
During the run at the Curran, Timmy and Pierre said, “Come and live with us.” I slept on a cot in their condo in Sausalito—and partied. There was a lot of partying at the pool with company members, with rock-and-roll guitarists, with John Lithgow, who was at the theatre next to ours, doing Same Time Next Year, and with Kevin, who had come out to visit me.
On one day off, Timmy, Pierre, and I went to Yosemite with some other friends. We were all sleeping in the same tent—two to a sleeping bag. None of us thought anything of it—this company had become blood because we were all in this together. Nobody could be more temperamental than the next person because we were all being beat up on a daily basis. So when I had to sleep in the same sleeping bag as Timmy, that was no big deal. He was my friend, my buddy. When we woke up, Timmy nuzzled up to me and whispered in my ear, “Hey, Patti, you wanna get up—or get down?” I laughed and got out of the bag.
I had the best time with those two guys. I remember one time driving over the Golden Gate Bridge on my way downtown to the theatre. The fog was rolling in. The city lights were twinkling. It was gorgeous. I thought to myself, I’m working in a big Broadway-bound musical. I don’t particularly care how bad the show is. This is great. How lucky am I? Not very, it would turn out.
I may have thought I was having a great time, but we were still caught in the power struggle between David Merrick on one side and Stephen Schwartz on the other. One particular bone of contention—besides “Bread”—was a solo of mine, “Meadowlark.” It’s a beautiful soaring ballad, but at seven minutes plus, it was way too long, David insisted, yet Stephen refused to cut it. Needless to say, I was on Stephen’s side—in my opinion, those seven minutes flew by. Take the time out of “Bread” if you want to cut something. Finally, while we were running in Boston, our fourth stop, David Merrick was overheard in a bar vowing, “I’ll get that song out of the show if I have to poison the birdseed.”
“Meadowlark?”
© MARTHA SWOPE/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
He then took matters into his own hands to solve the problem. The next day, we had both a matinee and an evening performance. In the morning David went into the orchestra pit, pulled all the charts for “Meadowlark” off the music stands, locked them in his attaché case, and returned to Manhattan. Before the matinee, Bobby Borad, our stage manager, came to my dressing room and broke the bad news to me that “Meadowlark” had been cut from the show. But David’s victory was short-lived. When Stephen found out what had happened, he took countermeasures. The charts magically rematerialized. By the evening performance, the song was back in.
After that, “Meadowlark” became a test of wills between them—it’s in, it’s out/in/out/in/out. In hindsight, and even at the time, I knew Stephen was right. “Meadowlark” is a haunting, beautiful song. Director Trevor Nunn was so taken by it—he kept hearing women sing it in auditions—that he mounted a London version of The Baker’s Wife in 1989. That production was not a success, either. The problem then was the same as it had been in 1976, and nothing has changed since. The Baker’s Wife has been revived and revived, each time because of Stephen Schwartz’s beautiful score. But there’s a fine line between a hit and a flop, and The Baker’s Wife has never made it across that border. “Meadowlark,” however, has continued to have a life of its own—and rightfully so. It is one of the most beautiful musical theatre songs ever written, and even though the show never made it to New York, it has become almost as much a signature song of mine as the one about tears and Argentina.
As the show continued to rot, my personal condition deteriorated right along with it. I was falling apart. I couldn’t sleep even on the Valium. One morning I looked in the mirror and went, “What happened?” My face was covered in tiny raised white dots. Danny Troob, our rehearsal pianist, just looked at me and said, “You look like Anna Magnani on a bad day.” That would’ve been funny if she wasn’t ninety and I wasn’t twenty-six.
There were more firings. The choreographer was next. I realized that the creative team was no longer functioning as a team at all. The disagreements between Stephen and David were constant. Even though everyone behind the scenes was individually talented, they were never in sync. Nobody got together on the concept. The set was heavy and the lighting was dark. Even though we were supposed to be in the sunny South of France, it looked like we lived in a Welsh mining camp. Theoni Aldredge had given us gorgeous, flowy, bias-cut costumes that made us look like we belonged on the runways of Paris rather than in a bucolic little village in Provence. And not only were we overdressed, we were over-orchestrated as well. The orchestra in the pit sounded like Broadway—all brass—not anything like the French countryside.
The constant revisions and rehearsals were bad enough, but even worse was the hideous behavior of my costar, the Israeli actor Chaim Topol. Throughout his time as Aimable, he was anything but. It seemed that he hated, well, everything. He didn’t like the lyrics, so he refused to sing them. Paying audiences actually heard “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” out of his mouth. He was obnoxious, unprofessional, and verbally and physically abusive to the cast. I know there are supposed to be two sides to every story, but believe me, both sides thought he was an asshole.
How bad did it get? Really bad. On my first day of rehearsal he grabbed my breast, “just to see how much meat was on my bones.” I let it go because I figured I had to make friends with this guy. That never happened. I had to call him Mr. Topol. He wouldn’t acknowledge me onstage, so the loving relationship between Aimable and Genevieve didn’t exist.
Timmy Jerome, who played the teacher, had to deliver a character description of Aimable, which Topol was not playing. So Timmy decided to go to his dressing room to discuss the lines with Topol to see if there could be some resolution. Timmy’s lines described Aimable as old, jolly, and in love with Genevieve. Timmy said, “You aren’t playing that, so it makes no sense when I say it.”
This must have been early in our relationship.
© MARTHA SWOPE/ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Topol contemplated what Timmy had said and replied, “Yes, I see … Mmm. Hmm. Let me think about it.” The next day, he put white powder in his hair and went onstage playing jolly like a hillbilly in heat, making goo-goo eyes at me, Genevieve. He was mocking Timmy in front of the rest of the cast and acting like a total idiot in front of a paying audience. He thought of himself as the virile chauffeur, not as the old man. He actually opened his costume shirt to reveal his hairy chest. Ew.
My relationship with Topol deteriorated to the point where he actually announced, “I don’t believe a word she says, onstage or off.” I don’t know why. It was clear I hated him in both places. Eventually seven of us in the cast wrote a letter to Actors’ Equity, asking to have his Equity card revoked, because he was so damaging to the production and detrimental to the company’s morale. For all of his bad behavior, he was also taking work away from an American actor.
There were two women in the cast, however, who were vying for the sexual attentions of Topol. They both had minor roles. Topol used those women, or at least one of them, against the rest of the company. He needed allies, and he didn’t have any—except for these two women. His dressing room was opposite mine, and on many occasions I would see the younger and sexier girl walk into his dressing room in a short dressing gown, and come out later with it half off. The other one (who was not as young as the sexy chorine), was desperately in love with him. At one point, when she found out about the seven of us who wrote the letter to Equity, she just looked at us with rage and tears pouring out of her eyes, screaming, “You’re shits! You’re just a bunch of shits!”
Sticks and stones, sister. Here, have a Valium.
We had the Equity-approved two-week break between Boston and Washington, so we all trooped back to New York, where David Merrick came yet again before the company to tell us that now he really knew what was wrong with the show—and he was going to fire Topol. I would’ve jumped up
and down if I’d had any energy, but I had to start rehearsal. What a bloody mess this was.
Shortly after we arrived in Washington, D.C., the last stop on our pre-Broadway tour, Topol was gone. While we were in D.C., I was subpoenaed to testify at an arbitration hearing because David had filed a claim against Topol. Actually, we all were subpoenaed—the entire cast. If we weren’t rehearsing, we were sitting around an arbitration table at ten o’clock in the morning. On the first day of the arbitration, David said, “The only person who’s come out of this ahead is Carole Demas.” He’d had to pay off her contract when she was let go back in Los Angeles, so now she wasn’t in this shit with the rest of us. It was meant as a joke, but none of us were laughing.
My new Aimable was the American actor Paul Sorvino. Sorvino looked like a husky defensive lineman and sounded like Dennis Day. Although far better known as a television and film actor, he did have some Broadway experience, having appeared in That Championship Season. He joined our company all full of bravado, enthusiasm, and superiority. “What’s the matter with you?” he said on his first day with the company. “Where’s your energy? C’mon! Give it your all! We’ve got to pull this together!” I hated him on sight.
I wasn’t alone. The company looked at him dead in the eyes and filled with venom. A pep talk was not what anyone wanted to hear. Fairly or unfairly, everyone took an instant dislike to him, and his attempts to rally us fell on deaf ears. We were simply too exhausted and too raw. We’d been through enormous pain together, and here he was berating us for not showing him 150 percent support or the desire to give our best. He was also the classic show-off tenor. On that first day before he was officially introduced to us, whenever a new cast member would enter the rehearsal room, he would hit a high C. It was like having Howdy Doody at Auschwitz.