by Patti Lupone
On the set of 1941, while I was crying, everyone else was happy for me. When Steven found out that I got the part, he announced it on the set and said to me, “I know talent.” He was proud that he’d cast me in his movie, and proud that I’d landed the role of Evita because Evita was everywhere, including Hollywood, three thousand miles away from New York City, six thousand miles away from London.
That evening I drove home to Jeffrey’s. “Everybody’s been looking for you!” he shouted as I walked in the door. “Earl Wilson has called three times.”
“How does Earl Wilson know I’m staying with you?” I said. At that very moment the New York Post columnist called again. I still don’t know how he got the number. We talked, or rather, he fired off questions and I stammered idiotic answers. My nerves were jangled and I was feeling totally spaced out. What is happening? I wondered.
Days later, I was sitting in Jeffrey’s living room and thought, I’m going on a roller-coaster ride. And then it hit me—that was exactly what Evita had done as well. That’s how I was going to play her, I decided, with a big smile on my face as if she were saying, Look at me. Look what I got away with. It was truly a revelation. Interpretations don’t generally come to me like that, or that fast.
The first day at rehearsal, Hal said to me, “I don’t want you to smile,” before I even smiled. “And I want gnarled hands.”
Uh-oh. That’s 180 degrees from the way I wanted to play her. I knew Evita had to have a sense of humor. She had to have a wink in her eye or the audience would not be able to come to her, or me playing her. But Hal Prince was my director, so rehearsals went on and I did what I was told to do. I learned the music, the dances, the scenes, but for the most part it was an out-of-body experience. I began to realize that I didn’t know how to sustain the singing of the role. I was scared shitless. One bright spot, however, was the fact that another Juilliard alum, Mandy Patinkin, was cast as Che.
At the beginning of rehearsal I was plagued with people telling me things that Elaine Paige, the original London Evita, did in the part. The producers brought three dancers over from the London production and they’d say, “Patti, now right here Elaine would do this. Here’s where Elaine did this.” I was polite for about two days. And then a Broadway reputation was born. “Shut up,” I said. “I don’t want to hear another word about Elaine’s performance. If you tell me what she did, then I don’t have a chance to discover it for myself. I’m an actor. I’ll figure it out.”
Well, that made me real popular with the kids in the chorus. I couldn’t deal with that; I had no time. But I did, unfortunately, have to deal with the alternate Eva, who played the Wednesday and Saturday matinees. She was nipping at my heels, praying for me to fail or fall so she could have my part. It was a real-life All About Eva.
Eva and her alternates have a sordid history. There was the Austrian alternate whose ex-boyfriend pulled a Tonya Harding on the first Eva—two nights before opening night. The ex-boyfriend hired thugs to beat the crap out of Eva, just so the alternate, who was unaware of the plot, could open the show. She did. Critics were impressed, but her run as Eva lasted ten days. The plot was exposed, the boyfriend was arrested and spent two years in jail. The alternate was quoted in the press saying her career was ruined. It probably was. I mean, how do you come back from that? Tonya didn’t. Maybe the alternate was a contestant on Viennese Celebrity Boxing. But I digress.…
My work was cut out for me. In addition to the difficulty of the singing, I really had to know who this woman was, because she was real. I read every book written about her. Hal gave me a tape of four speeches she had made from the Casa Rosada in a space of two years. She sounds very young in the first two speeches, then she sounds like she’s eighty when she gives the speech declining the vice presidency. At that point, she’s dying of cancer, and you actually hear the physical disintegration through her voice.
What I gleaned from the books was that Eva Duarte was an opportunist, and a very smart one. After she married Juan Perón and became a powerful woman in her own right, something unheard of then, she continued using the methods of the military but was simply more ruthless and vindictive in her responses. Juan Perón was part of the military establishment, but the books portray him as a slightly complacent, perhaps lazy man. Eva was ambitious, hungry, rich, and powerful, but I don’t think she revised the tactics the military government used. The brilliant move she did make was to embrace the lower classes, her people, known as the shirtless ones, the descamisados.
And they embraced her back. Because one of their own had risen to this great height, and because she did not forsake them, she became more powerful than the president, her husband. It was an amazing political coup. She eventually fell out of favor with the descamisados, though, because her ambition, greed, and vengeance were unbridled.
She discovered that she had cancer during this decline in her popularity. Many of the descamisados believed they may have caused her illness by abandoning her. When she died at age thirty-three, they petitioned the Vatican to canonize her: Santa Evita.
The story is truly fantastic. I would have pro-Peronistas and anti-Peronistas come backstage and say the same thing to me: “You have her to a T.” I don’t think it was my performance they were talking about. It was the memory of Evita and her powerful influence over the people who lived through her regime. One journalist despised her because he lived under house arrest for many years, but his son adored her because he had learned how to write by writing “Evita loves me” over and over at school.
Eva Perón was even more powerful in death than she was in life. She was embalmed and a crypt that would have rivaled the Statue of Liberty was being built for her body when Perón was overthrown and Evita’s corpse was stolen. In an effort to obliterate her spiritual hold over the country, the new regime filled up five caskets, four with sand, one with Evita. Each casket was sent to a different part of the world. It was a huge miscalculation. The country rioted and a president was killed—all in the name of recovering their beloved Evita.
Her body disappeared for seventeen years and only one person knew where she was. After Isabelita and Juan Perón married and Perón was again running for office, Isabelita convinced the Peronistas to bring Eva back to Argentina. That one person who knew her whereabouts was still alive and told them where she was buried. Evita was in Italy under the name of María Maggi. When they exhumed her, she was still perfectly preserved, with a scant hair out of place. Scary, huh? That became the political trinity: Evita, Juan, and Isabelita. I think the three of them won the election.
We had four weeks of rehearsal in New York before going to Los Angeles. Unlike The Baker’s Wife, Evita’s out-of-town run would be short, May through August, just L.A. and San Francisco, before coming to Broadway.
So there I was. I had landed the part, I was in rehearsal, and I was overwhelmed by what I had to accomplish. The blocking I could do; the acting I could do. The singing was frightening. Evita Perón’s voice was pitched high and the music reflected that height. The D, E, F, and G an octave above middle C were not intended to sound sweet. Which means there needed to be power behind the voice. The score, for me, was almost impossible to sing because I had no power in the passaggio.
As I recall, the day after we completed our New York rehearsals, we flew to L.A. and went straight to a sitzprobe (the company’s first sing-through with the orchestra) at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. (Yes, I was back at the Dorothy Chandler, scene of my last crime, The Baker’s Wife.) There were no microphones for the singers in the rehearsal room, and I remember Ruthie Mitchell, Hal’s assistant, motioning to me from across the room to go easy with my voice. But it was so exciting. I was singing with the orchestra for the first time. In my ignorance, I ended up singing over both the orchestra and chorus.
By the end of the night, after a flight, a sitzprobe, and a rehearsal onstage where more singing was required, I had lost my voice. There was nothing—no sound, nothing. Panic. The next day I was sent to Dr. Hans
von Leden, L.A.’s preeminent throat doctor, who said to me, “Your vocal cords look like raw hamburger meat. You cannot speak for the next five days.” It was five days till opening night. I was freaking out. Now, besides not being secure in my vocal ability, I was not able to do the technical rehearsals, which meant I couldn’t walk the stage, deal with the sets and props, learn the orchestrations, or master the split-second-quick costume changes, all fourteen of them.
Panic, fear, and failure set in. I was doomed before I began my run. I went to the doctor every day, and on the fourth day, I was healed enough to open the following night. I don’t know how I did it—sheer willpower, I guess. I opened the show, sang, acted, changed costumes, danced, and avoided bumping into the scenery the best I could.
I was out the following night. I blew out my voice in one show. My reviews were bad, my confidence nonexistent. It’s pretty much a blur, the following weeks, but I do remember going to a member of the chorus, David Vosburgh, during a performance and asking him what the vowel sound for “glory” was. He told me. Then I asked him if he would help me with the score. He said, “My partner said to me last night, ‘Can you help Patti?’ ” It was divined.
We started to work together, and ended up working on the score and on a vocal technique for most of my run. The producers put a piano in my dressing room and gave David a bonus. David saved my job. He gave me so much more than just the ability to finally sing the role. He gave me inner strength, and the valuable lesson that nothing is impossible—that diligent work, patience, and trust are the only things that will see you through to the very end of any journey.
The run in Los Angeles was very hard on me. There was tension with the stage management and tension with the alternate, who was going on for me more frequently than I ever anticipated. But there was always some manifestation, a sign from God that assured me I would conquer this part and survive. One of the manifestations was the uncanny appearance of the Evita groupies, who became known as the descamisados. They would sit in the first row and lob pink roses at me during my curtain call. You know when they throw roses at you that they’re telling you you’re good. Somehow they always showed up when I needed support the most.
I also had a visitation from Evita herself the night before I opened. I couldn’t talk about it for years. I thought I was nuts, actually, making up things in my mind to quell my fears, but Evita appeared to me three times during my run. She was there. Los Angeles was the first visitation. My family had flown in for opening night. My brothers went to stay with my cousin, and my mom stayed with me in the Hollywood Hills house I was renting. I was still on vocal silence. For two nights before their arrival, I had nightmares about Evita that would wake me up as only a nightmare can. My eyes would open in fear, and I would see, in the next room, a black rectangular box floating low to the floor. What am I looking at? I asked myself. Oh yes, that’s the fireplace in the living room. Next night: same nightmare, same image upon awakening. It’s only the fireplace. Go back to sleep.
On the third night, my mom arrived. She and I were sleeping in the same bed. I was on my back to her left, and she had her back to me. I woke up again from the nightmare only to see a female figure standing next to the bed, right next to me. She was wearing a colorless, diaphanous floor-length robe—almost like a shroud. She had shoulder-length hair that flipped up at the ends. She had no face.
I was terrified. I tried to scream but I had no air in my lungs; no sound would come out. I think my mouth was frozen open. I tried to nudge my mom, but there was a weight on my entire body. I felt paralyzed. I stared at this specter, and she didn’t move for what seemed like forever. There were no thoughts in my head, just this paralysis.
She finally, and I kid you not, flew out the little window, and as the last bit of her dress disappeared into the night, the weight on my body lifted. I bolted upright and said out loud, “Good-bye, Evita.” It shocked me to say those words, but I knew it was true. It was her. What happened next was that my mind, my heart, and my being just started releasing all this pent-up tension. I think she was saying, You’ll be fine because I won’t let you stink in this part. I’ll be circling.
I truly believe Eva was manipulating her entire glorious comeback. She had been vilified thirty years earlier, and she would now be glorified. Maybe it was all made up in my head, but what did happen was that my crippling fear started to subside. I slowly began to trust my training, my talent, and I set about conquering the beast. It didn’t happen in the nine weeks in Los Angeles; too many things were going on at once. I still had no command of the score, and there was no joy, only fear onstage every night. The bad notices kept coming and coming, and rumors were surfacing about my imminent firing.
Hal called me on the phone a couple of weeks after we opened to tell me he was returning to L.A. I thought, Oh shit! I’m doing my interpretation of the role, not his. Richard Allen, my hairdresser, actually thought I would be fired for changing my performance from what we had rehearsed to what I was now performing. Nothing was working; my voice was failing, so my first step in trying to find some comfort level onstage was developing a character I could be comfortable with while remaining true to the play. It was radically different from Hal’s interpretation, but after he saw me in the role he said, “That’s just what I wanted.” Duh, what? I counted it as a blessing. But that’s not why Hal returned to L.A. He told me that he was going to say something to the company that he and I would laugh about twenty years later. Well, it’s been thirty years and I’m still not laughing.
He assembled the company after the show and told us that an item would be appearing in Suzy Knickerbocker’s column in the New York Post. It would say that I was being fired and that Hal was waiting for clearance from Equity for Elaine Paige to take over my part in the American production. He also said that not a word of it was true. I was stunned, which was kind of amusing since I was already in a walking coma and didn’t think anything else could surprise me. Wrong again, Patti. “When you think you’ve hit the bottom, there’s always one step further down you can go.…”
The truth is that, yes, I was going to be fired. I found out seven years later when Clive Barnes, the New York theatre critic, casually told me that he had been consulted by Robert Stigwood and David Land, the producers, about who should replace me. Clive told me he said, “No one. Let her figure it out.” Clive and Hal were the only two people on the creative end who trusted that I would. Thank God I did. I would’ve hated to let those two men down. No, the joy of being fired from a high-profile role would lie in wait for another fifteen years.
The last and most devastating blow in the L.A. run was my not being able to finish my final performance. Nine weeks after opening night I was still frozen in fear onstage, but at least I was not missing shows. However, Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted to record the album during our final week of performing. He also wanted to start at ten in the morning. I said no. I agreed to record in the afternoon, but I told them that the recording sessions had to be broken up throughout the week. I was recording the album during the day and singing it again at night, not a great idea for someone who was having difficulty singing it once. We completed the recording, and on the Saturday morning of the final performance, I had nothing left. I was once again devastated by my vulnerability, and by the control those two tiny muscles, the vocal cords, had over my life.
The whole world was coming to the final performance in Los Angeles. It was sold out and tickets were being scalped. I started the show, and it was during “Buenos Aires,” my first big vocal-cord-busting solo, that I started to talk the song. I was, in a word, fucked.
At the end of the first act I knew I couldn’t finish the show. I had gone to a healer in Los Angeles in all sorts of desperation and she was at the show. At intermission, she did her best laying-of-hands on my throat. My doctor, who was also there, looked down my throat. Nothing could be done.
I was shell-shocked. I’d never been knocked off the stage before. I’d never not finished a performance
. My only thought was to get the hell out of the building as fast as I could before I heard the alternate singing “Argentina.” In fifteen minutes, I packed up a dressing room that I’d lived in for nine weeks. I did take special care, though, with one of my most prized opening night gifts—a galvanized bucket of snow, from Steven, Buzz, and the company of 1941.
Jeffrey, my mom, and I went back to my house. I don’t know how I got through that night. I seriously doubted my ability to play this part … and San Francisco was looming. The next day, as my mom and I drove north up the Pacific Coast Highway, I was once again on vocal silence. We passed what I took to be a very bad sign as we left L.A. On the way out of Malibu, I saw the most horrific car and pickup-truck accident, with several dead bodies covered but sprawled out across the entire highway. The image has never left me, and it is one I still associate with my run in L.A.
We arrived in San Francisco, where we went through another technical rehearsal, and I sang too hard. I blew another opening and I was out again. My notices were equally as bad as they had been in Los Angeles. Despite it all, I settled in for a seven-week run.
The stage of the Orpheum Theatre was where I had the second visitation from Evita. It happened during a preview. At the beginning of the show, as the movie screen was tracking back, a stage light overhead exploded. It shattered and rained down tiny pieces of glass over the center section, right where I was sitting. In my career it is the one and only time that has ever happened to me. The date was July 26, the anniversary of her death.
In San Francisco, the backstabbing within the cast, which had already started in Los Angeles, got a lot more intense. Down in the basement of the Orpheum Theatre, where the chorus and dancers lived, somebody put up the alternate’s good notices next to my bad notices. When I found out about these reviews going up on the wall in the basement and nobody having the decency to take them down, it was beyond upsetting. I talked to stage management about the problem before the performance. They just didn’t give a flying fuck. They should have controlled it, but they did nothing. I remember crying out loud, “I’m too small for this.” It went in one ear and out the other. I had no support backstage.