by Patti Lupone
This was in keeping with what Christopher Hampton, who wrote the book and cowrote the lyrics, had in mind. “We are making her more human, making the relationship more understandable,” he said at the time. “You feel for her, and that’s the point.”
We began previews on June 28, 1993. Opening night would be two weeks late. The technical problems were severe enough that the premiere, originally scheduled for June 29, had been delayed to July 12. This made for a lot of tension—some onstage because we knew we were short on rehearsal time, but even more at the box office. Really Useful had to coax, cajole, persuade, or strong-arm the existing July 12 ticket holders to give back or exchange their seats to accommodate opening night dignitaries and celebrities, including Nancy Olson, the movie’s original Betty, Billy Wilder, who had written and directed the film, and members of the press.
Those members of the press included theatre critics, both British and American. After initially saying he wasn’t going to do it, Andrew eventually chose to invite U.S. theatre critics to the London opening. This was an unusual change of heart—much had been made in the press of the allegation by Andrew that U.S. critics had it in for him, above all Frank Rich, who was then lead theatre critic of the New York Times. Even when it was announced in December that I’d be playing Norma, the papers reported that Sunset Boulevard was “skipping” Broadway and opening in London to make the show “critic proof,” because Andrew believed “he can’t win” with Rich.
Nevertheless, we continued barreling toward opening night, and the media circus was really ramping up. If I didn’t have Matt and Josh with me, and if I hadn’t been through it all before with Evita, I don’t think I would have handled it as well as I did. I had friends and family flying in for opening night, so when I got the “we have a problem” call from Madeleine Lloyd Webber, Andrew’s wife, I was not prepared for what she had to say. She was insisting that I had to disinvite some of my guests. She needed the tickets back.
Opening night parties have become mob scenes, which doesn’t necessarily make them fun, but that’s what they’ve become. I hate them. The invitation list goes way beyond the cast and crew, and includes celebs, journalists, and twenty-five thousand friends of the twenty-five thousand “producers.”
Madeleine actually said to me, “You know, Patti, the opening night party can make or break the success of the show.” Now, I’ve been on Broadway for more than thirty years, and not once did an opening night party affect a show’s success. The reviews and word of mouth did. You dilettante, you poseur, I thought. My tickets are a contractual point—nothing you can do about it, lady. But what I said out loud was, “Oh, dearest Madeleine, you can have twenty back.” In truth, I gave back nothing. I’d cushioned my guest list for the opening night party so all my nearest and dearest would get in without a problem. On opening night I was surrounded by the people I love and by the London actors I knew and loved from Les Miz. I don’t know who was sitting at Madeleine’s table.
I barely remember the first night’s performance. I must have been very nervous. It went on, I know that much. Murray Lane and Caroline Clements, my beloved dresser and hairdresser, respectively, kept me in costumes, laughing, and on the stage. We didn’t have any technical difficulties that I can recall and we got through it. There was a standing ovation, bravos, and general raucousness in the audience. I remember my dressing room after the performance much more vividly than the show itself. It looked like a wake. There were so many bouquets that we had to put half of them in the tub in the bathroom. The dressing room was soon filled to overflowing with friends, family, the creative staff, and well-wishers. Champagne was uncorked and everyone was jubilant. I was exhausted and relieved.
The opening night party was a zoo, but that’s how it goes. I don’t remember where it was or how long I stayed. It was loud and busy. I did talk to Billy Wilder, though I can’t remember what was said, but he seemed pleased. I kissed and hugged everybody, stood on a chair and waved, and then I went home. There’s not much to do at an opening night party. It’s work and hype. My dressing room before the party was so much more fun.
Now there was nothing to do but wait. When the reviews came in, the British press was somewhat mixed, but on the whole positive; the Americans were almost uniformly negative, sometimes brutally so. Perhaps predictably, Frank Rich was hard on us, and on me, calling me “miscast and unmoving.”
Robert Osborne in the Hollywood Reporter was particularly cruel: “LuPone should take the ‘Sunset’ off-ramp.… She is a distinctly negative hurdle if the show is to go further. LuPone never seems to have a clue as to how a great star would behave. As Norma Desmond, she has no mystique, no elegance. She often runs up and down stairs like Irene Ryan in The Beverly Hillbillies.… Glenn Close is a cinch to be an infinitely better Desmond; for one thing, she already possesses an imperious air that suits the role extremely well.”
She wasn’t opening for nearly a year and she was already getting better reviews than I was.
13
Sunset Boulevard, Part 2
JULY 1993–MARCH 1994
“With One Look.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY DONALD COOPER © 1993 RUG LTD
By the way, the reason I ran up those stairs “like Irene Ryan in The Beverly Hillbillies” was because Andrew refused to write any more music for Norma to exit with, and the stage-left exit was a long way up that staircase. Why he didn’t want to address the design of the staircase and the number of stairs it took to exit is beyond me. I remember the conversation with Trevor and I remember the “no.”
Once the excitement surrounding opening night died down, we settled into the run. We played to sold-out houses. I was getting standing ovations every night. In the London press there was no bad word of mouth, nothing about how I stank in the part. America was a different story. “Patti LuPone doesn’t seem crazy enough,” griped the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The part demands a sense of danger, of holding on by a thread, that the actress doesn’t manage.… The core of the character, the white hot purity and dignity that underlie the ragingly destructive fire, gets lost.” Yup, I got me some bad notices.
Opening night gift to Trevor: his head on a platter. I wonder if he still has it …
Despite the sniping coming from the United States, things were fine in London. Not only were Kevin Anderson and I great acting partners, but we all became a close-knit, happy company. During our technical rehearsals we were given membership to a private club down on its luck called the Green Room, across the road in Adam Street. It had been around since Victorian times, and when we started rehearsals at the Adelphi, it was full of nothing but old English actors playing snooker and falling off their bar stools. You could join for something like ten pounds a year, which we did. Peter Ustinov was once a luncheon speaker at the Green Room. He said it was like “addressing sailors in a submarine.” The place was painted a puke color green, the plaster walls were peeling, and you had to descend to the basement before the bar and game room revealed itself. It was a sad picture of a bar, but we made it one of our homes after the performance. The other place was the Spot, a club located diagonally across the road from the stage door in Maiden Lane. Andrew would come to the Green Room, as did John Napier and Trevor. It gained in popularity throughout our run, and when I brought Goldie Hawn in one night, the membership skyrocketed the next day. Eventually we couldn’t get in ourselves.
The goodwill was too good to last. Sometime in September I was having lunch at Orso in the West End when Richard Polo, who owns the restaurant in partnership with Joe Allen, came over to the table. “Just heard the ads, Patti,” he said. “They’re fantastic.”
I looked at him blankly. “Excuse me? What are you talking about? I don’t remember recording anything.”
Shortly thereafter I heard myself singing on the radio. Really Useful was running radio and television ads promoting Sunset Boulevard. The reason I didn’t remember recording anything was because they were using the same birthday recordings I made in April on the day I
arrived, right before Andrew’s party in my honor.
I felt violated—shit—again. They were using my voice without permission, without compensation. It was the worst kind of exploitation, not to mention a breach of contract. The attitude at Really Useful seemed to be that I was their property.
Norma Desmond costume fitting with Anthony Powell, one of my all-time favorite designers.
PAUL HUNTLEY
This was not very different from what had happened years before during Les Miz, and I had the same emotional reaction. I walked off the stage. I went home and called my agent, then waited for somebody from Really Useful to call me. I refused to perform until the matter was resolved. Really Useful invented a fig leaf for themselves, saying I’d come down with tonsillitis, but there was nothing wrong with my throat. As it turned out, their timing was not to their advantage. They had rolled out the radio and TV ad campaign while Carol Duffy, my understudy, was on vacation. Alisa Endsley, who was a member of the chorus and second understudy, went on as Norma. At the curtain of her first performance, Andrew made the in-your-face-Patti grand gesture, appearing onstage to present her with an armload of red roses. Then they blew up her notices and posted them prominently in the lobby. What Alisa said to the press, I’ll never forget and will be always be grateful for: “If it weren’t for Patti LuPone, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.” I wonder what Andrew was thinking when those words came out of Alisa’s mouth?
I think it was about this time that I started to be undermined by Really Useful. It was a kind of psychological warfare. I got the feeling that they were sabotaging me, trying to make it as unpleasant for me as possible. One of the most upsetting ploys was a financial one. They sent me a £35,000 invoice; that’s almost $53,000. Unbelievably enough, it was for the Sydmonton Festival workshop. Really Useful billed me for my airfare, my hotel, my meals—and they sent the invoice to the theatre. I opened up the bill as I was preparing to go onstage. I was still reeling from it when they called places. I remember feeling faint and confused. That’s a lot of money. I told Kevin about it and he shrugged it off, calling them Really Useless. I never asked him if he got a bill as well.
They also cranked up the rumor mill again. PATTI’S TRIP TO BROADWAY FADES INTO THE SUNSET, trumpeted the headline to Baz Bamigboye’s column in the September 17 edition of the Daily Mail. “It seems Andrew Lloyd Webber wants a new Norma for Broadway, and I hear he has approached another actress,” he wrote. A few days later, the rumor jumped the pond. New York magazine was reporting that Really Useful had offered me $1 million to give up the role before the show came to Broadway.
Nobody suggested this to my face, but there wasn’t much doubt where this insider information was coming from. It had to be coming from someone in the Really Useful organization. Who else would have anything to gain from planting this tidbit? Who else would a journalist have accepted as a credible source?
Warfare or no warfare, I had a contract that guaranteed I would open as Norma in New York. I believed I was contractually safe, so I wasn’t too worried. In hindsight, of course, I should have been. It’s no secret that Andrew Lloyd Webber has a thin skin when it comes to bad reviews. He takes them very personally. And now he was obsessing over Frank Rich’s review.
Andrew sought me out in the Green Room one night in the early fall. He was leaving for Los Angeles to start rehearsals with the second company, and all he could do was cluck and wring his hands about how disastrous Frank Rich’s review had been for the show. I was so over his greed, his insecurity and megalomania, that I was fresh out of sympathy, especially since it was his own fault. Andrew himself had invited Mr. Rich to London to see the production, after he’d initially said he wasn’t going to do it.
It had already been announced that portions of the show would be substantially revamped for L.A. because of the review. To be sure, the London production had its problems, but I was not the problem (and if I was, I’d like to think I would admit it—and if I admitted it, I’d like to think I’d put it in this book). Nevertheless, everything written about Sunset Boulevard from New York or Los Angeles still seemed to zero in on me. American critics didn’t like the show, so it was shoot the messenger, pretty much. “I feel like I don’t have a soul on my side over there,” I said at the time. “They like me so much better here than they do in the States.”
Norma’s mad scene in the finale of the musical.
PHOTOGRAPH BY
DONALD COOPER © 1993 RUG LTD
LuPone bashing was the order of the day. “Sunset Boulevard has one liability that can’t be rewritten: Patti LuPone,” said the New York Daily News. Variety reported that Andrew Lloyd Webber had wanted to get rid of me as soon as the Frank Rich review came out.
Director Trevor Nunn went with Andrew to Los Angeles to launch the second production. He sent me occasional bulletins from L.A. as the work progressed:
Andrew has made a number of changes in the score … but I doubt whether somebody who had seen the London production once would be able to tell you what the changes were. I mean, Norma still blows him away and then goes nuts—we don’t suddenly have a happy ending here….
The pioneering work we all did in London made it easier, but it’s still a very tough show. Everybody in the L.A. cast is in a state of true and genuine admiration for the original company in London who had to ride the bronco first and prove it was possible to stay on.
While Andrew was in Los Angeles preparing to open the show, he got more and more noncommittal about my playing Norma on Broadway. “Ms. LuPone is reportedly under contract to repeat her role on Broadway, though Mr. Lloyd Webber was faintly elusive on that subject,” wrote Bernard Weinraub in the New York Times in early December. “It all really depends on how things go here,” Andrew replied, meaning in Los Angeles. If I had a contract, why would that affect me? Andrew also told Weinraub that Glenn Close’s Norma was “darker.” “Patti’s a great singer,” he continued. “She’s primarily a musical-comedy star.” All of this hurt me tremendously and yet I was supposed to have a thick skin and go on night after night after night.
After Sunset Boulevard opened in L.A., the gossip really intensified. Glenn Close received rave reviews, but then again, she didn’t have to sing the same high notes that I did. Andrew lowered the keys for Glenn. The score was extremely high, and again, only a few agile singers could sustain these songs eight shows a week. Lowering the keys also took the excitement out of the songs. Nevertheless, critics adored her. Her performance “catapults her into the sphere of megastars,” gushed Vincent Canby in the New York Times. “Ms. Close’s triumph seems certain to complicate the question of who will be playing Norma if the $10 million show comes to Broadway next fall.… There’s bound to be pressure now to bring in the star of the L.A. company.”
The rumors were still swirling in January when Kevin Anderson decided to leave the production. “Why are you leaving, Kevin?” I wailed, clinging to his pant legs.
“Because I can” was his answer. Kevin had his reasons and it’s not for me to discuss them here but it broke my heart. I loved being onstage with him. He left and I was lucky his understudy, Gerard Casey, was as good as he was, but Kevin’s absence left a hole in the show. He was a great Joe Gillis. He took an extended vacation and when he returned to London we went out to dinner together. I asked him if he was going to do the New York production, hoping he’d say, “Not without you, Patti darling.” He said he hadn’t decided. Kevin was not asked to reprise his role as Joe Gillis. Kevin was also not told he wouldn’t be reprising his role. A bunch of cowards, is all I can say. When I saw Trevor a couple of years later, he said he hadn’t heard from Kevin. I looked him in the eye and asked him why he was surprised. Apparently he didn’t know Kevin wasn’t told he would not be playing Joe in New York. “You’re the director, for God’s sake.” It was hard to believe, as much as I love Trevor.
At one point early in the new year, I received a call and had to make an emergency trip to New York for a funeral service. A childho
od friend from Northport had died. It was a shock. She was only forty-two when she died of ovarian cancer. I called Richard Oriel, the company manager, and told him I had to go home. I knew I couldn’t miss very many performances, so I had my travel agent book a round-trip on the Concorde. The plan was to go to the funeral, stay overnight, and head back to London the next day. I was only going to miss one performance; I’d be back in plenty of time for the evening show.
Or so I thought. This was January of 1994, and the East Coast was in the midst of another snowy winter. It was blizzard after blizzard. I boarded the Concorde the day after the funeral. We were supposed to take off at nine A.M., but an hour later we were still on the ground because they were de-icing the plane. Even though it was only a three-hour flight, I knew that between getting through customs and getting through London traffic, I was in trouble for making the eight o’clock curtain. I asked the flight attendant if there was a phone on board and explained to her I was performing onstage in the West End. I needed to call the theatre and let them know I was going to be late. “We have no phone,” she said. “This is the Concorde.” I still don’t know what that meant—the plane goes fast, so they couldn’t possibly have phones in it?
I fell asleep and slept through takeoff. When I woke up, we were airborne and there was a note by my tray table that said, “The captain would like to see you.” What did I do wrong? was my first thought. I pushed the call button and the flight attendant took me up to the cockpit. I felt like I was going to the principal’s office. They opened the door and there I was in the cockpit of the Concorde with a true force of nature, Captain Terence Henderson.