Patti LuPone

by Patti Lupone

  In the past, if you were a star, you dressed to go to the theatre, you dressed to be seen leaving it, and you dressed with gloves and high heels just to walk around in life. I’ve been wearing costumes all my life. I don’t know how to dress myself. I don’t know how to shop. One of my favorite shopping sprees was buying a sweater, a pair of boots, and a car. During Evita I left the theatre in jeans, with my long brown hair and a clean face, having just taken off the stage makeup. As I came out the stage door, I’d look people in the eye, knowing that they were waiting for me—or Evita—and I’d walk right by them because they were looking for a tall blonde. I was completely invisible.

  When the weather warmed up, I started walking regularly from the theatre to the Oyster Bar in the Plaza Hotel—a great bar that was also a discreet hangout for Central Park South hookers. I’d sit at the far end of the bar so I could watch the people coming in. The bartenders would say hello and talk to me. I remember in particular this wonderful Jamaican bartender. None of them ever knew I was Evita. All they knew was that this girl came in, sat in the corner, and drank two beers. When I was sufficiently buzzed, I’d grab a cab and go home. They must have thought, That poor little hooker, she never manages to get a single customer.

  Sunday was my day off. Vocal silence all day, all night, all Monday until showtime.

  At one point, one of my dearest friends in the world, David Ingraham, got through my telephone madness and invited me to go with him to a New York Rangers hockey game. David had four prime seats in Madison Square Garden, right on the ice behind the opposition net.

  I had known David’s family since I was a kid in Northport. I grew up with the Ingraham kids, David’s cousins. As grown-ups, David and I came together in the strangest way. He was a friend of Margot Harley, John Houseman’s administrative assistant at Juilliard. She later became the executive director of The Acting Company. Northport and Juilliard collided. That gave me the creeps … too close.

  When I was a kid, I went to hockey games when the Long Island Ducks—now the New York Islanders—played in the Commack Arena. I loved watching them play. On that Sunday in February 1980, the American hockey team beat the Russians at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics. I watched the game on TV. I was cheering and crying—silently, of course. Everything I did was silent when I wasn’t onstage.

  That same Sunday night I went to the Garden with David to watch the Rangers play the Islanders. The atmosphere in the Garden was electric because of what had happened just that afternoon at Lake Placid. Everybody in the place—eighteen thousand strong—was screaming, “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” Except for me … on voice rest. After that, every Sunday I’d go to the Garden with David and whomever else he invited. I couldn’t talk, but I’d bang on the boards whenever I felt I needed to express myself. I fell in love with ice hockey. It also gave me a social outlet from my self-imposed Evita isolation. Those Sunday games and the Oyster Bar were my only diversions from this musical, the musical that made me a star, and gave me a hostile reputation. Ah, the glory …

  But back to the stage. Sometimes a hit requires a lot of proof that it’s worth the audience’s effort. In the case of Evita, with a book so sparse and convoluted and music so odd for a Broadway musical, we had to work at it every minute of the two hours we played. By now most of the audience knew who this woman named Eva Perón was, and this created a moral dilemma for them as they watched the show. How were they supposed to react to her?

  Mandy Patinkin and me in “Waltz for Eva and Che,” the only time these two characters interact onstage.

  © MARTHA SWOPE/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  I tried to make her human. I did my best to make her accessible to an audience, even though she is depicted quite accurately in the musical. There are moments in the book when she is hateful. However, I wrung a laugh out of the audience in “A New Argentina.” And I was able to make them cry at her death in the second act. I had to find ways to curry favor with the audience. How could I tell the story if the audience didn’t care about the character?

  When the curtain came down is when the ambivalence toward her really set in. When Mandy took his bows, he had it relatively easy. He was the Greek chorus, and he had the audience on his side immediately, but the applause level during my curtain call, which followed his, used to dip. That was fun—I had the last bow; they’re supposed to go crazy for the actor who comes out last, but Mandy consistently got the big cheers while mine were … polite. As much as people may have wanted to applaud my performance, they were ambivalent about the character I was playing. It’s a testament to how much I love Mandy that I didn’t want to murder him. I will say that by the end of my run, I was finally getting the reaction I wanted. I don’t know whether I improved in the role or I just willed them to clap harder, but they did. Whew! (P.S. By then Mandy had left the show.…)

  Nevertheless, the fever that made this show a hit remained constant. One night, a dentist from New Jersey brought his entire family. He had lived through the Peronista regime. He was anti-Peronista, but he still had every newspaper printed on the day Evita died. He came to my dressing room and gingerly turned every page of these old Argentinean newspapers, very carefully showing me his treasures. No one could touch the newspapers but him. He was obsessed. Evita had died in 1952, almost thirty years earlier. If he was anti-Peronista, I wondered, why was he hoarding those papers?

  Sometime during our run, I gave myself permission to be social and went to see a cabaret act after the show. Pete Sanders was the press agent for the club, and suggested I do my own cabaret act.

  At first I didn’t want to do it. But then I remembered how my applause was dipping and thought, What the hell, I want people to know who I really am, and it’ll give me something to do during the day.

  I remember going to David Lewis’s apartment once a week. He became my musical director and he put an act together for me. I learned it, but I don’t remember actually rehearsing it.

  I don’t know where I got the nerve to sing more than just the musical Evita. I think I was desperate to get off this treadmill and have some fun. After the Saturday curtain I didn’t have to sing again till Monday night. I should’ve been on vocal silence, but on Saturday night I went down to Les Mouches, a club on Twenty-eighth Street and Eleventh Avenue, and performed at midnight. We opened at the beginning of March 1980, and we were going to do it for just four weeks, but it became a hot ticket. We kept extending the run—it was sold out every week for twenty-seven weeks. It was wild.

  At Les Mouches, with Stephen Sondheim, 1980.

  I performed there the night before the 1980 Tony Awards. My Tony dress was a disaster and I had to wear my sweaty Les Mouches tuxedo to the Tonys. Jeffrey was my date once again—between the show and the act, I didn’t have time to scare up a boyfriend. Jeffrey told me that right before Faye Dunaway announced the winner for Best Actress in a Musical, I shoved my purse in his lap and said, “Here, hold this!”

  “And the winner is Patti LuPone!” I was out of my seat and on that stage. I don’t remember any of it.

  Alongside my best friend, Jeffrey Richman, on our way to the Tony Awards.

  In L.A. and in New York City, everybody came to see Evita—Jack Nicholson, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Ginger Rogers, Helen Hayes, Lana Turner, Sammy Davis Jr., John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, Andy Warhol, baseball players, hockey players, a couple of queens—actual royal ones—and Imelda Marcos. They all came backstage. I was awestruck. When all is said and done, I’m still a fan and a tourist. Lana Turner came to see the show with her hairdresser, and they came backstage. I think she enjoyed the performance, but she sat with me for an hour, because the paparazzi had materialized out of nowhere and were hanging around the stage door. She was trapped. While the stage doorman was looking for another way to get her out of the building, she told me a story.

  Backstage with Maxene Andrews and Angela Lansbury.

  There used to be an Argentinean film festival during the Peronista regime, and all of the Hollywood movie stars woul
d go. One time while Lana was in Buenos Aires, Evita kept sending her invitations to the Casa Rosada, but Lana kept declining them. As she was getting ready to leave the country, Lana found that her passport had been confiscated. Then the secret police showed up and took her by force to the Casa Rosada. She didn’t know what was going on. She thought she was going to jail.

  Lana sat and waited. When Evita was ready, they ushered Lana into her presence. “I just wanted to tell you,” Evita said, “that I modeled my pompadour hairdo after yours.” And with that, she gave Lana back her passport and wished her a safe trip back to Hollywood.

  I don’t know which I thought was more amazing—Lana’s story about Evita Perón, or the fact that I was sitting in my dressing room, knee to knee, with Lana Turner. Every time someone famous came backstage, I was shocked.

  And then my contract was over. I left Evita in January of 1981, even though they asked me to stay. They offered me a raise, though it wasn’t anything substantial; I think I was only making three thousand dollars a week for that part. I left with nothing to go to, and everybody thought I was out of my mind. When they asked me why I was leaving, I said, “Because I’ve lost my sense of humor.”

  Closing nights in the theatre can be extraordinary events—and not just on Broadway, because I’ve had closing nights that were extraordinary in London and in Sydney as well. People who buy a ticket to celebrate that particular performance, that show, celebrate it in a way that lives in their memory forever. Evita was one of those nights. A lot of people who’d seen the show came back to see the closing night. I cried pretty much through the whole thing, but I was so relieved when it was over. The show was a success, I was finally a success in it. My contract was over. I was done. I’d played Evita for twenty-one months.

  People think that if you have a success in a Broadway show, the doors open up, that it’s a stepping-stone to Hollywood. Not in my case. However, I was invited by the renowned Romanian director Liviu Ciulei to come to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis to play Rosalind in As You Like It the following year. Because I had such enormous admiration for him as a director, and because I was dying to work with him, I said yes. I would go back to my roots, which was repertory theatre.

  But this was not the end of Evita. I went home to my apartment with nothing to do. Three months after we closed, the phone rang. I picked it up on the first ring. It was Robert Stigwood, Evita’s producer. “Would you like to come to Australia to play Evita?”

  Robert explained to me that Jennifer Murphy, who was playing the role in Australia, had severely damaged her voice, to the extent that she was now speaking the part, and would not be able to sing the role in Sydney, which was the final stop on their tour. I completely understood about the voice problem, and I bled for her. Every woman who has ever played the part onstage has been knocked off of it for a week, for a year, for the rest of her career. I said yes to him right away. Nobody’s ever going to ask me to work in Sydney again, I told myself. I’m going.

  It was a very long flight to Australia—New York to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Hawaii, Hawaii to Sydney. I traveled with Richard Allen, my hairdresser, and one of the stage managers from the New York production.

  When we got to Sydney, we were met by people from the press department and the general management for the Sydney Evita. They took me to my hotel, the Sebel Townhouse. I remember standing in front of the hotel and I heard, “Yo, Patti!” I looked up and there was Billy Joel’s band—Liberty DeVitto, David Brown, Russell Javors, and Doug Stegmeyer—all Long Island boys.

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d flown twenty-four hours to Sydney, Australia, and landed on Long Island.

  I partied with the band for a week and a half. Until I started rehearsal, I hung with these guys and they made me laugh. I hadn’t laughed for so long. I was very glad for the comic relief the Long Island boys provided.

  Before I left for Sydney, I somehow had the presence of mind to ask the producers, “Are you buying my performance for the Sydney production?”

  “Yes, we are,” they said, even if they weren’t really sure what I meant. By “buying my performance,” they were buying everything I did onstage in the New York production. I wouldn’t have to relearn the part. I was speaking on instinct, but it was the smartest thing I could have said. When I started rehearsal in Sydney, I discovered that the company was doing everything on the opposite foot. For instance, on Broadway, when I did “Waltz for Eva and Che,” I started with my left foot going backward. In Australia, the choreography began with the right foot going backward. If I had not asked that question about their buying my performance, I would be forced to relearn all the choreography in five days.

  My New York stage manager argued, “For expediency’s sake, Patti, just do it.”

  “Nope,” I said, “management bought my performance.”

  It made relearning the show infinitely easier and the Australian company was happy to comply. After all, my being there meant the show wasn’t closing.

  Tony McNally, my wonderful company manager, found me an extraordinary apartment in Point Piper, where the “fourth wall” was the Sydney Harbor, the Harbor Bridge, and the Sydney Opera House. When the sun set over the Harbor Bridge, I knew it was time to get in the car and go to the theatre. On days off I explored every possible part of Sydney. I was so very happy in Australia. I had a Canadian hockey-player boyfriend who followed me to Sydney. I had someone to love and to share all this with.

  The Australian people were great. I also got the reviews I’d always wanted. My favorite was, “She acts like an inspired witch.” I said, “Yes, finally. Thank you.” I just hope it wasn’t a typographical error.

  Perhaps my success was due to the fact that finally I was vocally secure in the role and I could have a blast playing the part. I could sing it. I could sing it at last. I was doing something vocally that I hadn’t done before, which helped me to relax, be comfortable, and have fun. I don’t know what it was—maybe it was the three months off, maybe it was vocal cord memory—but whatever it was, I was able to sing the role with enough ease to get on a plane during rehearsals, fly to New York to sing “Buenos Aires” on the Tony Awards telecast, go to the after-party, fly back to Sydney in time for rehearsal, and sing the shit out of the part—all in twenty-four hours.

  I was there through September of 1981. My closing night in Sydney was extraordinary. In Australia they have a candy called Jaffas, and it’s come to mean good luck onstage. If the audience likes your performance, they’ll roll Jaffas down the aisle to you. On my closing night, there were tons of Jaffas rolling down the aisles.

  And then there were the streamers. The audience upstairs started throwing streamers from the balcony. These hit the mezzanine. The mezzanine streamers hit the orchestra, and then the orchestra threw streamers, which hit the stage. I’d never seen that in a theatre before. The orchestra pit and the company onstage were covered in streamers. It was a phenomenal closing night.

  After I finished in Sydney, I went home to New York. I was back in the same apartment, waiting to go to the Guthrie Theater, which wouldn’t happen for another year. I was waiting and alone. The hockey-player boyfriend only lasted through my Sydney run. I had just done the biggest show on Broadway, and at this point the rest of the world was thinking I was a huge Broadway star.

  But the reality is that it’s not what you think it is. It never is. Goddammit.

  9

  A Working Actor, Part 1

  1982–1985

  Oliver! Ron Moody as Fagin, David Garlick as The Artful Dodger, Braden Danner as Oliver, and me as Nancy.

  © MARTHA SWOPE/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Home. It felt familiar but not necessarily comforting to be home in Manhattan with time on my hands. Actually, it felt a lot like I was starting over: I was back in my apartment, I had no love life, and I had no work.

  Worse than that, I had convinced myself that this was a permanent condition. Sitting there staring at the four walls, I was sure I’d never be hired a
gain. Or loved again. But boyfriends could wait. I needed a job and no one was banging down my door. What if the banging had stopped forever? (Which could also apply to my love life, but I digress.…)

  Crazy thinking? Not really. It’s the actor’s life. At the end of one play, most of us think we’ll never work again—a feeling that lasts until the next play comes along.

  Somehow it always does. The phone rings and someone asks, “Are you interested?” and you’re on to your next role. No matter how many years I ride this roller coaster of emotional highs and lows—“I’ll never work again,” “I just got the best job!” “I’ll never work again,” “I landed the biggest musical since Oklahoma!”—it’s impossible to be completely reassured. I’ve never entirely gotten over the panicky feeling that my career is over after I’ve packed up yet another dressing room and said, “Good-bye, I love you,” to yet another backstage crew and allowed that nagging question to creep back into my brain: Now what? I’m hopeless at everything else. How much could I get for that Tony on eBay?

  At least I knew not to hold my breath for another major role on Broadway immediately following Evita, much as my agent might have thought I should. Even the actors who are considered “Broadway working actors” don’t just go from one Broadway play to another. Life in the theatre doesn’t work that way. After Evita it would be years before I again set foot on a Broadway stage. If I’d turned down everything that came up in between, I would have starved. But more important, I would not have grown as an actor. I would’ve missed truly enriching personal and theatrical experiences.

  I was fortunate that my midnight show at Les Mouches had opened up a whole new way for me to make a living on the stage. But I wanted another acting role, and was not about to wait for the next Evita. I went back to my roots. I was a trained actor—an actor who earns a living on the stage. I would pursue my craft and take the part that was offered, whatever and wherever that may be, knowing that not every show is a blockbuster musical, and not every play is a hit. Good or bad, hit or flop, each one teaches you something. I ended up doing some of my best work in these productions. The work was done mostly in plays. People say to me, “You’ve had the most wonderfully diverse career, moving from musicals to plays to TV to opera to cabaret.” The simple fact is I go where the work is. It’s not planned.