by Patti Lupone
Meryl and I have never been close friends, but I believe there has always been a mutual generosity and respect between us. She, Mandy Patinkin, Kevin Kline, and I were all on Broadway together, in 1975, across the street from one another—Meryl and Mandy in Trelawny of the Wells, and Kevin and me in The Robber Bridegroom. Through all of this, Meryl herself said nothing publicly, and I don’t for a moment believe that she or her people had anything to do with this mean-spirited speculation in the media. But if it wasn’t coming from me, and it wasn’t coming from Meryl, where was it coming from?
My guess is that Andrew’s company, Really Useful Group, was planting rumors and innuendos in order to generate interest in the show. Nobody was controlling the gossip because nobody wanted to. Who else would have benefited from the hype? Still, through all of the speculation in the press followed by all the reassurances from Andrew, the contractual negotiations were turning ugly and threatening. I remember saying to my agent, “Is this worth it?” I was made to feel that even though the part was handed to me by Andrew himself, I was lucky to get what I was getting monetarily and I was replaceable if I wasn’t satisfied, and generally I should go fuck myself. Ooh, I couldn’t wait to get on that plane and work my ass off for a company called Really Useful Group. Useful to whom?
Finally, at the beginning of December 1992, Andrew and I faced reporters in London and it was announced that I’d be playing the role of Norma Desmond. Andrew was gracious: “Patti LuPone played the role when we performed the show at my Sydmonton Festival earlier this year. To say that she was a tremendous success and left the audience exhilarated and moved by her performance is an understatement.” That night, Matt, Roger Allam, my cast mate from Les Miz, and I went to see Sam Mendes’s Donmar production of Steve Sondheim’s Assassins. I wondered two things:
1. Would Andrew be pissed off that I chose to see a Sondheim musical?
2. Why couldn’t I be in a Sondheim musical?
In the wake of the announcement, the buzz in the press was amazing and positive. Liz Smith said that Sunset Boulevard was already being talked about as “the theatrical happening of 1993.” I returned to Los Angeles to finish Life Goes On. Through my best friend Jeff Richman, I met lyricist Scott Wittman and composer Marc Shaiman at their housewarming party in Laurel Canyon. As I left the party, I just happened to say to Jeff, “Do you know anybody who could put together an act for me?”
“Scott,” Jeff said. I approached this new person in my life and asked him if he would create a show for me. We started working at his house with musical director John McDaniel. During the rehearsal period, John came to me with an offer—ten nights at the Westwood Playhouse, now the Geffen. I accepted the engagement and we billed it as my farewell to Los Angeles. I again had to get permission from my producer from the TV show. No problem. I was barely on the show anymore. Now I was starting to have fun in L.A.! Isn’t it always the way? You meet lifelong friends ten minutes before you leave the city?
One night my new friend Scott Wittman, Matt, and I went to the Queen Mary, a drag club on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. We got very drunk. At one point I went to the ladies’ room and came face-to-face with two six-feet-tall drag queens, both prettier than me. I said, “Girls! Guess what? I’m playing Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical, Sunset Boulevard!” They squealed in delight. Afterward I felt so tawdry. That’s where I chose to make my personal announcement. Drunk in the ladies’ room of a drag club. Hmmm … another omen missed, one could say …
Life returned pretty much to normal in L.A. I worked on the set and rehearsed my concert with Scott and John. My agent was still in negotiations with Really Useful, even though my getting the Sunset Boulevard role had already been announced in the press. One day I received a very funny gift from Stephen Sondheim. He sent me what he called the “real score” from Sunset Boulevard. In the late 1950s, Gloria Swanson made the first effort to get a musical version of Sunset Boulevard produced, but nothing had ever come of it. The composer was a man named Richard Hughes, who was said to have been her lover at the time. As an added bonus, Steve also included a track of Swanson herself performing the climactic song on The Steve Allen Show. It is something only he could have found. It is a treasured gift and quite a listen. Steve has a wicked sense of humor. Gloria’s musical adaptation? Not so good.
In February I taped my last episode as Libby Thacher. It was a wrap for the season as well. I said my Good-byes to my favorite people, packed up four years of Los Angeles right before the earthquake, the riots, the fires, and the mudslides, and headed back home to Connecticut. Rehearsals in London weren’t going to start until April, but there continued to be a lot of media coverage anyway, relentlessly fueled by the PR machine at Really Useful Group. It is an article of faith that the opening of any Andrew Lloyd Webber musical must be a highly anticipated extravaganza, a newsworthy event. Everything leading up to Sunset Boulevard was news, even buying a ticket.
Even though by 1993 we were well into the age of telephone ticket sales, it was impossible to buy a seat for Sunset Boulevard except in person (unless you were overseas). This meant that when the Adelphi Theater box office opened, the queue on that first day supposedly stretched for more than a mile. Some will say it was a photo op manufactured for the TV cameras. Andrew Lloyd Webber himself sold the first tickets. That first day’s advance sales amounted to £500,000. Before the curtain finally rose in July, advance bookings had risen to £4 million. That’s roughly $6 million, and Sunset Boulevard was pretty much sold out for the first six months of the run. It was a new record for the West End.
On Palm Sunday in early April I was in the midst of packing for London, when my friend Philip Caggiano called and asked me whether I was mad at Barbra Streisand. “Why would I be mad at Barbra Streisand?” I replied.
Why? Because the New York Times was reporting that she had recorded both “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye”—Norma’s two most powerful ballads—for an album that would hit the stores before we even opened. That’s why.
What? Again? This is exactly what happened when Andrew let Barbra sing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” before we opened Evita on our pre-Broadway tour. When I was cast as Evita, one of my first tasks was recording “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” It was never released. I never knew why, except I found it odd that Barbra had recorded it as well and her recording was out there for all to hear. Was I mad at Barbra? No, I was mad at Andrew. When I’d done my concert at the Westwood Playhouse, I had been specifically forbidden to sing anything from Sunset Boulevard. The story from Really Useful at the time was that Andrew wanted to hold these songs in reserve so we could premiere them with great fanfare on the cast album. Now Barbra had been given the chance to cherry-pick the best of the score, and put her imprint on the songs that I should have been originating before I was even in rehearsal. And according to the Times, she’d recorded them in February. What a bunch of crap. Yet another portent I chose to ignore.
I felt as if something had been stolen from me—again. It’s insulting for an actor who is originating a role to be barred from originating the musical material associated with it. Certainly under these circumstances I felt insulted, devalued … but I’m not sure that mattered to Andrew in the slightest. Having Barbra record these two songs was part of the global hype to promote the greater glory of Sunset Boulevard.
This was yet more proof of the total disregard Andrew seems to have for the directors, designers, and actors who present his work to the public. From his point of view, there was nothing collaborative in the success of any of these shows; they sprang purely from his own musical genius. The rest of us who took what we were given—shaped it and made it work—had nothing to do with it. And we did make it work—not to take anything away from the writing, but you can’t put a score on a bare stage and have an audience feel and care and stay interested for two and a half hours. It’s a collaboration.
During negotiations, Really Useful informed my agent that there woul
d be a production of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles before the show opened on Broadway, but they refused to let me be in it. This angered me beyond belief. I was supposed to be the original Norma, in England and in America. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. They insisted that I do London, skip Los Angeles, and then go to Broadway. Their argument was that because Los Angeles would open about four months after we did, my doing it wouldn’t give me enough of a run in London. L.A. would keep running after we opened on Broadway.
It was going to be Evita all over again. There would be two U.S. productions running simultaneously, inviting comparisons and setting up competitions. I told my agent to tell them I’d skip London and just do it in L.A. and New York. That didn’t fly with Really Useful. I seriously don’t know why I agreed to take on the part in the first place. Everything was a battle and I was on the losing side. I was not getting what I wanted in the deal, so why did I stick with it? What was so important to me about doing this role? It’s a question I still ask myself.
My agent finally came to an agreement with Really Useful, but not without a lot of screaming and tears—screaming from me, tears from him. (Kidding.) Because the negotiations had been so bloody, I told him that I was not leaving my home until I had a signed contract for both the London and New York productions in my hand. When that finally happened, I sent my family’s luggage—five trunks—to London.
On the day Matt, Josh, and I were to fly to London, we closed up the house and waited for the car to take us to JFK. The phone rang. It was my agent. “Are you sitting down, Patti?”
“Oh no, now what?”
“Andrew Lloyd Webber just announced that Glenn Close will play Norma Desmond in Los Angeles.”
I was stunned.
Before I started rehearsal in London, Andrew Lloyd Webber had called a worldwide press conference to announce Glenn Close as the L.A. Norma ten months in the future. My agent had been right to ask if I was sitting down. I was blind with rage.
Just then the car arrived. I handed the driver our three tickets and said, “This is what you came for. Take them back to Really Useful in Manhattan.” Matt, Josh, and I went back into the house. There would be no flight to London that day, or the day after that. Why didn’t I stay home altogether? It’s another question I still ask myself.
It took three more days of negotiating to actually get me on the plane. I had several conditions Andrew Lloyd Webber had to satisfy, starting with Glenn Close not attending the London premiere, or being anywhere in the vicinity while I was rehearsing the part. Having ambushed me with the announcement the way they did, there was no way I would now let them parade someone about who would be playing the part almost a year later. I so wanted the drama to end right there in Connecticut, nurse my wounds and look for another job. Worse yet, the fact that the timing of the announcement coincided with my leaving for London was enough to rekindle the gossip fires in the press. For the second time now, Really Useful had orchestrated what would look to the media like a catfight between two actresses.
Having been through the Patti/Meryl rumor mill in the fall, I was now confronted with endless Patti/Glenn speculation. And the biggest irony of all is as I was setting foot on a British Airways flight to finally start rehearsal for Sunset Boulevard, I got a call from the Director of Musical Theater for Lincoln Center Theater, Ira Weitzman, asking me if I was interested in the role of Fosca in Steve Sondheim’s new musical, Passion. Finally a Sondheim musical. But I was grudgingly on my way to London. My five trunks were sitting in the house they’d rented for me. They’d never send them back if I just bagged the whole thing. I cursed my luck. Why did I send those damn trunks? Another question that has a stupid answer at best.
Andrew Lloyd Webber had created dueling Normas. Immediately after the announcement, Baz Bamigboye, who was and still is the Liz Smith of London, reported that there was “unconfirmed talk” that Glenn Close would take Sunset Boulevard to New York. His column drew a staunch letter of denial from Andrew: “Patti LuPone will give the world premiere of Sunset Boulevard in London,” he wrote to the Daily Mail, “and will repeat that role on Broadway.” He was never quite that unequivocal again.
Matt, Josh, and I arrived in London in mid-April, just before my birthday. Our home for the next year was a stunning six-story house located at 17 Stanley Crescent, in Notting Hill. The back door opened out into a very mature two-and-a-half-acre garden, more like a private park, really. It was great for our three-year-old son, who learned how to talk in London and came away with a proper British accent. The house became known as “The House of Good Vibes,” and it was my refuge the entire eleven months I lived in London.
I had missed three days of rehearsal, but before I began, I wanted a meeting with Andrew, Trevor, and Patrick McKenna, Andrew’s something or other. My agent calmly explained to them the emotional damage they had caused me already, and I tried to explain how they had set up a competition between two actors and someone was bound to lose. They assured me it was not true, I was the most important Norma, blah, blah, blah. It was useless. The three of them didn’t hear a word I said. I felt no satisfaction after the meeting. It deflated me even more. But I forged ahead. I don’t to this day know why I didn’t walk away. I was given all the signs and I recognized them, but it didn’t stop me from this crushing force that kept me heading into the Sunset Boulevard disaster. Legally I couldn’t walk away. I had a signed contract in my hands. I had to uphold my part of the deal.
Sometime after the meeting, Andrew said quite casually, “Let’s go to the studio.” What for? I had just gotten off the plane. My body and my voice were still somewhere over the Atlantic. Nevertheless, he was herding me off to sing in the studio. At the time I had no idea why, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t getting paid to be there. I recorded Norma’s two big numbers—the Barbra Streisand songs.
That night, Andrew threw me a welcoming cocktail party. What did he play at the party? The songs I’d just recorded, over and over and over. They were running a musical backdrop for the party, and it made me feel like an organ grinder’s monkey, performing for the pleasure of his guests. Monkey had to leave early. I had a previous invitation. Cameron Mackintosh was giving me a birthday party upstairs at the Ivy restaurant. I don’t think Andrew was happy I left his cocktail party, especially for another producer’s celebration, but like everything else that swirls around Andrew, the recording was a surprise and his cocktail party was a surprise. I truly felt as though my freedom had been usurped now that I was employed by Andrew and his company.
Ah … happier times.
It was finally time to rehearse. We started working at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. The rehearsal period was fun. I love English companies. In this one, there were no psychodramas, no personality conflicts, no backstabbing. If there was an issue, it was discussed sensibly and resolved in the best way possible. I also love the dialogue British actors have with their directors. There is a dialogue. Plus, my dear friend Bob Avian was the choreographer, so I had a pal on the creative side. I was so happy to have Bob there and to be working with him. He remains one of my very closest friends. We all would walk along the river to the local pub every day for lunch. Kevin Anderson and I were back playing Joe and Norma. Everything was fine until technical rehearsals began at the theatre. In preparation for Sunset Boulevard, Andrew had acquired, gutted, and completely refurbished the Adelphi Theater, at a cost of some £1.5 million. Everything was new. Moreover, John Napier’s set was very ambitious. Everything was done on a grand scale, and everything moved. The problem was that you couldn’t always be certain when it was going to move. John Napier had done the sets for Les Misérables. I love John and his brilliant mind.
Getting taken for an unexpected ride by the scenery was another matter entirely. The Sunset Boulevard set had tremendous problems, and the technical rehearsals were brutal. The biggest scene changes involved what was then state-of-the-art electronics, but they couldn’t get the bugs out … for my entire run of nine months. At entirely r
andom moments, the sets, including Norma’s living room and grand staircase, would jump downstage at will—as much as four feet at a time—with Kevin and me on them.
There were times when the house wouldn’t fly in and times when it wouldn’t fly out. It turned out that whatever radio frequencies they were using to trigger the hydraulic lifts on the sets were the same frequencies every cell phone … and every taxi-cab … and every courier service in the city were using. Anyone in the West End passing by the Adelphi could give me a thrill ride just by picking up the phone. When they finally figured out what was wrong, they started making modifications to the lifts and the set, which meant we couldn’t rehearse onstage. It got so wacky that one day when I was sitting in the mezzanine, I witnessed a huge fit Andrew was throwing at the entire creative staff, ending with him pulling the score from the show. I thought to myself, It’s the theatre of the ridiculous now. You pulled the score from yourself. You’re the producer, you dimwit.
The public eagerly followed every bump on the road to our premiere. Because this was an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, the buzz in the media continued to intensify. In the lead-up to opening night, the British press corps often asked me about my interpretation of Norma Desmond, and my response was consistent. Above all I wanted to avoid camp—Norma had already been satirized by generations of drag queens, and I had no intention of becoming one of them.
I wanted to create a character, not a caricature. Norma had to be real—extravagant but real. To me, the Norma written for this musical was what was left of the star that the Hollywood machine had created, then mercilessly spat out when the movies learned to talk. She never got over what happened to her; the wounds to her psyche never healed. Her ostracism made her unstable, and her rejection by Joe Gillis finally pushed her over the edge. To be sure, Norma Desmond was a woman who was larger than life, both as a great actress and as a movie goddess, but at the same time she still had to be recognizable as a flesh-and-blood human being.