Patti LuPone

by Patti Lupone

  Peter’s production was so expansive and so unexpected. It employed the physical space of a theatre like no other production I’d ever been in. The upstage firewall was raised for the exit of a spinning desk. The prison was the fly rail and the stairs leading up to it. The set was green and black patent leather, and every inch of the Eisenhower Theater’s bare stage walls was used. There were no teasers or tabs that as a rule identify the difference between backstage and onstage.

  Peter took the James O’Neill script and interpolated the Bible, the original novel, and Alexander Pope into O’Neill’s very thin adaptation. We were schooled in melodramatic acting, which was to be the style of acting for the play. As Mercedes, I was constantly falling to the floor in a dead faint. This was problematic—I had to figure out how to do it so as not to provoke laughter from the audience. Slowly turned out to be the answer, as if I were doing a balletic move. I conquered it eventually, but it took several rounds of audience snickers and guffaws to get it right.

  The show was long, three hours and forty-five minutes long. We would have symposiums after some performances, and members of the audience were, among many other things, angry. Angry at the length of the play, at the interpretation of the play, at the direction, whatever—it was definitely live theatre in the house during these heated discussions. Nonetheless, I was privileged to be acting in this play. I loved working with Peter as much as I’d loved working with Liviu Ciulei. What I would give to work with both of them again. How proud I was to be a part of this production.

  Unfortunately, ANT itself didn’t last long. Peter is too innovative, too avant-garde, for a town like D.C. What a pity. I really wanted to be a member of a permanent national company. This could’ve been it.

  10

  The Cradle Will Rock, Les Misérables, LBJ, A Sicilian in Sicily

  1985–1987

  “I Dreamed a Dream.”

  PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL LE POER TRENCH © CAMERON MACKINTOSH LTD

  The summer of 1985 found me in London, reprising my roles as The Moll and Sister Mister in Marc Blitzstein’s play The Cradle Will Rock. As The Moll, I sing what may be the best-known song from the show, “The Nickel Under Your Foot.” This was the second time we’d presented it; the first time had been two years earlier at the American Place Theater in Manhattan.

  The cast that first time was made up entirely of alumni from The Acting Company. I’d been surrounded by familiar faces—David Schramm, Mary Lou Rosato, and Henry Stram in particular. John Houseman directed us. For him, The Cradle was very much a sentimental journey, and not just because we’d all been part of his repertory company.

  To give you a brief history of this musical, in the fall of 1936, John and Orson Welles formed WPA Project 891, also known as the Classical Unit of the Federal Theatre. Their third production was The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein, described by its author as “a Labor Opera—composed in a style that falls somewhere between realism, romance, vaudeville, comic-strip, Gilbert and Sullivan, Bertolt Brecht, and agit-prop.” Someone in Congress concluded that Marc Blitzstein had written a leftist, antiestablishment, even communist play using taxpayer money. It had to be stopped, and with the collusion of Actors’ Equity, they proceeded to shut it down. Three days before opening night in New York City, a dozen WPA security guards took up residence at the Maxine Elliott Theater to ensure that the costumes, props, sets, musical score, and the leading man’s toupee did not leave the theatre, since everything was considered government property.

  Welles and Houseman barricaded themselves inside the ladies’ powder room, the only room off-limits to the government, and scrambled to put the show on despite everything. Defying the authorities and with unbelievable cunning, they secured an empty theatre twenty-one blocks uptown from the Maxine Elliott, and rallied the opening night audience to follow them, gathering more people along the way. The house was filled to the rafters. Alone onstage, Marc Blitzstein sat at a piano and played the opening chords. Although the cast had been forbidden by Actors’ Equity to perform onstage, they had not been forbidden to perform in the house, so they played the scenes in different and unexpected parts of the theatre, with the stage managers finding and illuminating them with handheld spotlights. It was a huge success. John and Orson were subsequently fired for insubordination.

  It was this version that we presented at the American Place Theater almost half a century later. The only thing onstage was a piano and black chairs. Before the performance, John Houseman, now eighty-three, stood in front of the audience and told his very moving personal account of the turbulent opening night of The Cradle Will Rock. The play itself is the story of an industrial town in the grip of Mr. Mister, the villainous boss of the steel plant. Highbrow himself, he uses lowbrow threats, coercion, and violence to keep his workers and the townspeople under his thumb. The Cradle Will Rock is an amazing piece of theatre, a legendary piece of theatre history, and a show that is still relevant today. We played to full houses. John said it was an audience he hadn’t seen in a long time, made up of theatre students and the Old Left. One night at the end of the show, as we were descending the stairs to our dressing rooms, peeling off bits of costumes and wigs, we heard a commotion in the audience. We all turned around, raced back up the stairs and into the wings. A man was reprimanding the audience and all we heard was, “The Mr. Misters still exist today and the only way to stop them is to JOIN THE COMMUNIST PARTY!” Live theatre. That moment was truly exciting and paralyzing. But what is theatre if it doesn’t incite, doesn’t move, doesn’t change us in some way?

  After a successful run at the American Place Theater, we closed Cradle and I went on to do and prematurely close two Broadway shows. Then I left for D.C. and the American National Theatre. When my five months with ANT were over, the Cradle company left for London and the Old Vic Theatre, where we enjoyed minor celebrity in the English theatre world. Vanessa Redgrave became fascinated with our show and especially with John. We became “theatre darlings” with a host of English actors who had never seen the play or might have had leftist beliefs. We were in English theatre heaven. One of my most treasured memories is of John’s birthday party in the lobby of the Old Vic after a performance. We were drinking and chatting away when a Bentley or a Rolls-Royce pulled up to the lobby doors. The chauffeur got out, went to the back door of the car and opened it. We froze on the spot, silent and breathless staring at the scene unfolding before our eyes. “Who’s going to get out of the car? Norma Desmond? The queen?” He reached into the car and retrieved a single red rose, came into the lobby and presented it to John. It was from Vanessa. She’s in a class unto herself. We were awestruck. John took it in stride, as if this happened to him every day. He was amused but nonchalant. That was John—so nonchalant that he planted his Emmy Awards in his flower garden. When the garden was full, he used them as doorstops.

  Vanessa visited him quite often and they had long talks. We ended up doing a benefit for the Workers Revolutionary Party, a far-left Trotskyist group, at the behest of Vanessa and her brother, Corin. I had to give up my dressing room to John, who had to give up his dressing room to Lady Rachel Kempson, Dame Wendy Hiller, and Dame Peggy Ashcroft. I so wanted to burst open their dressing room door and sing, “Dolls! There is nothing like a dame, nothing in the world!” John forbade me.

  While we were performing The Cradle Will Rock in London, I started rehearsals for another musical: Les Misérables. I played the role of Fantine, a young wistful girl forced into prostitution to support her illegitimate child.

  Cameron Mackintosh again offered me a part. I love this guy. He’d seen my picture in a London paper announcing the upcoming run of The Cradle Will Rock, and before I left for London, he came to my apartment and played me some of the music. I knew it was going to be a hit after hearing the first four bars.

  “Yes. I’ll do it.”

  I should have told him to call my agent, but I said yes right away because I was excited by the music, and perhaps even more excited by the significance o
f his offer. I was an American actor being asked to work in London with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). I said, “Yes, yes, yes.” Then I thought about the really bad position my “yes” put me in when it came time to negotiate.

  When the Cradle company had arrived in London in August, I’d started coughing nonstop. I coughed for the entire seven months I was there, through The Cradle Will Rock and all through Les Misérables. A cold, wet North Atlantic wind chilled me to the bone. I had a beautiful complexion but I was freezing all the time. It didn’t do much for The Moll in Cradle, but it worked for Les Miz, because Fantine was consumptive. However, it’s very interesting how Dr. Broadway takes over when one hits the lights. I’d be backstage and I would see stars on the first cough and the coughing could last for forty-five seconds, but the minute I hit the stage, I never coughed once.

  Les Miz was rehearsing at the Barbican, then the theatrical home of the RSC. I would leave rehearsal early each day because I was still performing The Cradle at night. One of the stage managers escorted me to the door every afternoon. “The Barbican is a maze,” he told me. “You won’t find your way out by yourself.” The maze at the Barbican brought me back to my days at Juilliard, which had a similar tangled network of hallways and corridors. I began to realize that there was something so right about my decision to stay in London for this production. It felt as if I had come full circle.

  Les Miz had two directors, Trevor Nunn and John Caird. Early on in the rehearsal period, they assembled the company and said that when the principal players finished their roles, they would then become part of the ensemble and partake in the varied events that made up the story of Les Misérables.… I don’t think so, I said to myself. I sure as hell didn’t come to London to be in the chorus of a four-hour musical. I had to think quick. During rehearsals, I had a bulletproof excuse. I was still performing The Cradle Will Rock at night.

  After Fantine dies twenty minutes into the first act of this four-hour extravaganza, there’s a big waltz that introduces my daughter, Cosette, to the proceedings. After Fantine finished “dying” in rehearsal one afternoon, John said, “Patti, my dear, you should be part of this next section, the waltz.”

  “Oh, darling John, I simply can’t,” I purred. “I’ve got a show to do tonight and I must … go …”—think quick!—“lie down.” I kind of did need to lie down. Thanks to The Cradle, I got out of that scene and a few others.

  At the end of our rehearsal period and before the technical week began, the company was given five days off so that the set could be loaded onto the Barbican Theatre stage. By this point The Cradle had completed its run, so I was free to return to New York to see my fourteen-year-old cat and my boyfriend at the time. When I got back to London, I went to the Barbican, looking for the company. All I found was the cook in the green room snack bar. “They’re not here,” he told me. “They’re rehearsing at another theatre because we’re loading in the set.” I had totally forgotten.

  I went to the other theatre and entered from the lobby just as they were staging the barricade scene. I was standing at the back of the orchestra when a member of the cast and my friend (so I thought), Sally Mates, spotted me. I didn’t duck fast enough.

  “Patti’s back!” she hollered.

  You bitch! I thought.

  John turned around and said, “Oh, smashing. Patti, come join us.”

  Fuck! Busted. I begrudgingly walked up onto the stage and was now a member of the ensemble in the dreaded barricade scene. However, I did everything I could to shorten the length of my stay. I entered as a grown man, a smelter in fact, not even knowing what a smelter was, but when the character Enjolras tells the women and children to leave the barricade, I beat a hasty retreat as a little boy clinging to the hem of Sally Mates’s skirt. However much I hated being in that damn barricade scene, I was lost in reverie every night Colm Wilkinson sang “Bring Him Home.” Now, there’s a voice. The barricade scene is the only scene the actress playing Fantine is in, and only because Sally Mates called me out, the raving bitch, as I stared at the rehearsal onstage too jet-lagged to react with my usual lightning speed. I never forgave Sally. She laughed her head off at me every night in the scene.

  We opened at the Barbican on October 8, 1985. Before we opened, Trevor Nunn and John Caird prepared us for what they thought would be the Barbican subscription audience response to our little play: “Nothing,” they said. “Because they are used to and want Shakespeare.” During the curtain calls on opening night, people were standing, crying, and screaming, “Braaavooo,” waving their arms and wildly clapping over their heads. We were a hit. Despite snippy reviews, audiences loved it. As the New York Times put it, “Rarely has there been an occasion when so many nasty reviews counted for so little.” Ticket scalping was a regular occurrence. I was so right. I smelled a hit. This guaranteed our move to the Palace Theatre in the West End in two months’ time.

  We played this musical to delirious audiences. However, we had major technical problems. Our barricade set kept breaking down. One night as it was revolving and lowering halves onto each other, the stage-left barricade didn’t lock into place and slammed into the proscenium as it was revolving with actors astride. We all left the stage for forty-five minutes, time to go to the pub next door. It was one of only two times we got to go to the pub. Les Miz was so long that all the pubs were closed by the time it was over. Everything was closed by the time it was over. Anyway, on this particular night, the set was repaired and the show went on. One night at the Palace Theatre, we had to cancel the show at the beginning of the second act because the barricade repair couldn’t be made—the only time I’ve been sent home from the theatre because of a technical problem, and the second time we went to the pub on a show night. My cast mate Roger Allam, who played Javert, and I went next door and got drunk. Whoopee!

  Fantine’s death scene, with Colm Wilkinson as Jean Valjean.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL LE POER TRENCH © CAMERON MACKINTOSH LTD

  Royalty came to the show. Early in the Barbican run, Princess Diana was at the performance as the chair lady, or something like that, for the Mary Rose Trust. The money raised at the benefit performance went to the excavation and preservation of the shipwreck Mary Rose. When Princess Di arrived, the orchestra played eight bars of “God Save the Queen,” but they didn’t play the whole thing because she wasn’t the queen. It sounded so crazy. I guess there’s no “God Save the Princess” song.

  I was so starstruck that I gave my entire performance to her. I sang “I Dreamed a Dream” to her and even bowed to her. After the show, the cast was invited to the Barbican atrium to meet the princess. I was the first one up there, just waiting, waiting, for her to arrive. We were all lined up, except for the few Republicans who didn’t show because they despised the monarchy. One of our cast members refused to take his curtain call in protest. As the princess came in, she was backlit, followed by a ton of press and photographers.

  It was a Hollywood movie-star entrance, no question. But after all that anticipation and excitement, she moved down the line, speaking only to the men, skipping right over all the women. Being a little boy-crazy myself, I wanted to say, “I totally get it, girl.” But I just stood there and stared at her, disappointed but mesmerized.

  I was busy onstage but my personal life was a wreck. It was early autumn when one morning I got a phone call from the States. It was my boyfriend—breaking up with me. I started screaming and crying. “What am I doing here?” I wailed.

  My friend and cast mate Michael Ball was living with me at the time. My crying woke him up. He went to the liquor cabinet, got out a square bottle, and pushed it in my direction. It was still morning. In our pajamas we walked on Hampstead Heath as I threw back gulps from this square bottle in between the wails and torrent of tears. I have no idea how I performed that night. I was drunk on my ass by eleven in the morning. I still don’t know what kind of alcohol comes in a square bottle, but if you’re an emotional mess and somebody offers you a swig, take it.


  It was as if melancholy was my permanent condition. From Kevin on, all of my relationships had ended without any resolution. I was in London, in a musical hit, acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but I went back to that spectacular house at 87 South End Road in Hampstead Heath by myself every night, lonely and miserable … misérable … ha-ha. The interesting thing about my breakup this time was how well it informed the role of Fantine. There’s a lyric in “I Dreamed a Dream” where Fantine sings, “He slept a summer by my side, but he was gone when autumn came.” Life imitates art—that and the coughing. Apart from the cowardice of the guy who broke my heart, my misery was magnified because I wasn’t home. I “wasn’t surrounded by my lovely things,” as Sada Thompson put it when a Thanksgiving dinner she was giving while on the road was not going as planned. Jack O’Brien told me the story and I love that expression and use it from time to time. It says it all. Somehow things become intensified when we’re on the road. To see a picture in a frame or use the familiar coffee cup or sleep in one’s own bed can chill out the most dire of emotional upheavals. I travel with a pillow all the time. I once left it at an inn in England and almost had a nervous breakdown until I had it in my arms again. I paid a king’s ransom to get it back. Like I said, things intensify when we actors are on the road.

  While I was being totally miserable every day and performing every night, I learned two things about the theatre in London: (1) A fireman presides over each and every theatre once we all have left, and (2) A priest or minister presides over the souls of the inhabitants of these theatres. The firemen protect those glorious and historical theatres from fire and destruction. The priests and ministers introduce themselves to the company and are there for anyone about to self-destruct and in need of their guidance and prayer. When I arrived at the theatre despondent, I met with the Barbican’s minister and he talked with me for weeks. I can’t remember his name or even what he looks like, but he never failed me and was so diligent in his concern over my mental and emotional well-being that I almost converted to the Church of England, or worse, returned to any kind of organized religion.