Patti LuPone

by Patti Lupone

  “Take a seat right there, young lady.” He pointed to the engineer’s seat. I sat down, my eyes saucers as I stared at the cockpit controls. It was Star Wars, I swear to God. “I understand you want to make a phone call. Whom do you want to call?” he asked, picking up a phone.

  “I have to call the stage door of the Adelphi Theater to let them know I might not be there tonight,” I said.

  He finally got a dial tone somewhere over Nova Scotia, made the call, and Graham, our stage doorman, answered. “Hello, Adelphi Theater, Graham speaking.”

  “This is Captain Terence Henderson from the Concorde calling. We’d like to speak to Miss Tina Marshall,” he said, then handed me the phone. Graham had a very distinguished voice, but it leapt up two octaves when this statement sunk in.

  “Tina, Tina, pick up the phone!” I heard him squeal.

  “Hello, Tina speaking.”

  “TINA! IT’S PATTI. I’M ON THE PLANE BUT I’M GONNA BE LATE!” I screamed. “CALL REALLY USEFUL AND FIND OUT IF THEY’LL HOLD THE CURTAIN, OR SHOULD I JUST GO HOME?”

  “Can I call you back?” she asked.

  “NO! YOU CAN’T CALL ME BACK!” I almost said, “This is the Concorde, we don’t have phones!” but then I remembered I was on one.

  “Oh, yes, she can,” my captain said. “Call 1-800-Concorde.”

  “WHAT? NO WAY! TINA, CALL 1-800-CONCORDE!”

  We hung up, and at that point Captain Henderson swung around in his captain’s chair and bell owed, “You’ll go on tonight and you’ll give the performance of your life! The audience did not pay to see an understudy. They paid to see you! Now, get some rest. We’ll get you there. No worries!”

  What the fuck just happened? I went back to my seat, fell asleep again, and woke up to another little note on my tray table; this one said, “They’ll hold the curtain.” Now, come on. If I stunk in the part, would they bother to hold the curtain? That’s my question. Anyway, we were close to landing. I found the flight attendant and said, “I have to vocalize—I have to get ready for the show.”

  “Well, you can use the galley,” she said. The Concorde was already loud—tiny but loud. I could see passengers turning around and looking in my direction, wondering what was going on. I was hidden behind a little curtain, but they could still hear me doing my vocal warm-up. I don’t think I sold any tickets based on that performance.

  When we landed, I was rushed off the plane first. A British Airways special agent met me and whisked me through customs and immigration. We hit the floor running and I ran and ran through the very long terminal. I jumped in the waiting car, hoping the traffic would be light. It was now 7:15 … 7:20 … 7:30 … I was still vocalizing in the poor driver’s ear. By the time we turned left into Maiden Lane, I could see Richard Oriel holding the stage door open, looking down the lane. We screeched to a halt. It was twenty minutes to eight.

  I raced up to my dressing room. Stage management continued making the calls over the Tannoy: “Twenty … ten … beginners, please.” It was now eight P.M. All the while I was chattering up a storm at my dressing table while Caroline Clements was pinning my hair, I was putting on my makeup, and Murray Lane was dressing me as best he could.

  The stage manager called to check in. “How much longer will you be, Patti?” she asked.

  I was standing and pacing the floor. “I’ll be ready in … I’m ready!” I said. I was costumed, wigged, and the makeup was on my face.

  We all stood there in a daze. I have no idea how but I’d done it all in eighteen minutes. Murray and Caroline had calmly worked around me while I talked their ears off. On a regular show day the process would have taken two hours. We went up on time and stage management told me that I cut two minutes off the show that night. The adrenaline was screaming!

  Murray and Caroline kept me onstage in all kinds of weather. We did laugh in that dressing room. It wasn’t all bad. In fact, so much of it was good that it made the bad moments appalling. They remain dear friends and I can’t imagine being on the London stage without either of them.

  Eventually Captain Henderson of the Concorde and his wife came to see the show. When we talked afterward, he told me that he’d used every bit of aviation lingo short of Mayday to get priority clearance for landing that day. That experience was such a welcome diversion. It provided laughs in my otherwise tense existence.

  I was still combating rumors, depressed as hell. My run as Norma in London would end in mid-March. I had only about two months left, and as much as I loved London and the house on Stanley Crescent, I was looking forward to getting home to Connecticut. I was unsure about New York. I had not a drop of support from anyone after they left for L.A.

  On February 16, I was in my dressing room preparing for the show when I got a call from New York. It was my agent with the news. Liz Smith’s column bore the headline IT’S GLENN AS NORMA. “It isn’t even a bet; it’s a fact,” she wrote. “Although the Andrew Lloyd Webber company won’t confirm or deny, Glenn Close will begin rehearsals as Norma Desmond in New York on August 1.” I got fired in Liz Smith’s column. I didn’t take it well.

  The same day, my oldest friend in the world, Philip Caggiano, sent me this fax. It reads:

  Dear Patti,

  I’m sorry about this nightmare they’ve put you through, although I admire the dignity that you’ve maintained in dealing with such a horrible situation.

  As Tennessee Williams said in concluding his “Memoirs”—“After all, high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”

  You know I love you.

  Best to the boys,

  P.

  Dear, dear Philip, so much for grace …

  From the outside, I’m sure it sounded like all hell had broken loose in my dressing room, which in fact it had. I was hysterical. From the beginning of my involvement with Sunset Boulevard, I’d been in a snake pit of innuendo. Meryl, Barbra, Glenn … Every day I had to read that someone else was singing my songs, or that someone else was taking my place, or that someone else should have taken my place. After months and months of escalating speculation and rumormongering, followed by denials from Really Useful that were at first ironclad but grew less and less convincing by the day, to be handed this kind of public humiliation—in the worst possible way—overwhelmed me.

  I took batting practice in my dressing room with a floor lamp. I swung at everything in sight—mirrors, wig stands, makeup, wardrobe, furniture, everything. Then I heaved the lamp out the second-floor window.

  Not surprisingly, Richard Oriel came running in to see what was going on. “I’ve been fired from the New York production,” I said. “I’m not going on tonight. I don’t know when I’ll return. Bye.” I was sobbing. I do remember cast members hearing the screams and sobs and coming in and trying to console me, hugging me and feeling helpless. I can still see their faces. Remember, this was a tight company. When one of us hurt, we all hurt, and they’d been watching me, silently helpless to do anything.

  I fled the theatre and returned to Stanley Crescent just as two of my friends, Bryan and Lindy Watson, arrived from Washington, D.C. They’d just gotten off the plane, having flown all the way to London to see me perform.

  “I’m fired,” I told them. They started laughing. “No, really,” I said. “I’ve been fired. Pick up your bags. We’re leaving town.”

  The Watsons, Matt, and I got in the car and drove to the Yew Tree Inn in Newbury, a charming seventeenth-century inn that Cameron Mackintosh had first told me about. We proceeded to get shitfaced. I stayed away for two or three days, just trying to pull myself together and figure out what to do next. The first question was whether to finish the run. Everybody in my camp told me that as painful as it would surely be, I had to stay on the stage. Why? Because I had a contract. “You have to perform,” they told me. “If you don’t go on, it gives them a way to weasel out of the money they will owe you.”

  I must point out that none of this was Liz Smith’s fa
ult. Both before the incident and after, she has always been supportive and generous to me in her column. When she ran the piece, she had no idea she was breaking the news not just to her readers, but to me as well. After the initial bombshell, she was incredibly sympathetic. “This has been a cruel experience for Patti LuPone,” she wrote. “I hope she wrings every dollar, and then some, out of her contract.”

  In the wake of the announcement, I could see that working with Really Useful had adversely affected all of us. One night the cast was at the Spot, and suddenly our fireman (just as there had been during Les Misérables, there was still a fireman who slept in every theatre in the West End) burst out of the stage door and ran across the road yelling, “Eighteen pence! Eighteen pence!”

  “What’s the matter?” we asked.

  “I got a raise from Andrew Lloyd Webber—eighteen bloody pence!” he spat. In other words, about a quarter, twenty-five cents. As disrespectful as that was, it turned out to be not that unusual. Within the cast and crew, it seemed that everyone involved with Sunset Boulevard had been subjected to this kind of treatment, the lack of care, the disregard. We’d all become so much chattel to him.

  Mom and Andrew Lloyd Webber at the House of Good Vibes: the irony.

  Meanwhile, back at 17 Stanley Crescent when my friends, Matt, and I returned, there was a circus outside of my front door. It was the one and only time I’ve been stalked by paparazzi. It was very interesting and cruel at the same time. Bryan would walk out of the front door every morning for the paper or coffee and they hounded him, thinking he was Matt. Bryan’s a very funny ex–hockey defenseman. He had serious laughs with the British paparazzi. I was quite lucky to be able to sneak out of the back door and through the two-acre garden to another street. The photographers couldn’t figure out how I escaped each night.

  Andrew Lloyd Webber continued to be an unmitigated coward. He didn’t have the balls to tell me in person; when the news broke, he sent flowers but no apology. Then he sent two of the most delusional letters I’ve ever read and which I actually tossed in the garbage, then pulled out and saved. I wanted to reprint them here, but though the letters were sent to me, incredibly, I don’t have the legal right to reproduce them without approval from Andrew Lloyd Webber. So without reprinting them, I can still give you the gist.

  On February 17, 1994, he wrote to say how sorry he was that he couldn’t give me the news personally, because he was on his estate in Sydmonton. (For the record, Sydmonton is just sixty miles west of London.) He assured me that he was as upset about the situation as I was. He claimed to have put everything he had into his efforts to get me to Broadway as Norma, and that the bad U.S. reviews of the London production had almost killed any chance of mounting the show in New York.

  According to Andrew, he was not the one making the decisions. Paramount Pictures (who owned the underlying rights, because of the original movie) and his financial investors were the ones really responsible for getting me fired. He expressed his sympathy that I was “unhappy,” and suggested that I do my best to end my London run in triumph. He hoped that the two of us would work together on another major project sometime in the near future, and that “a joint commitment to each other would make a far better end to this sorry affair.” He then repeated his sorrow that he couldn’t present this letter to me personally, ending with “Much love, Andrew.”

  His February 28 letter, in which he wrote to say he’d had a “brainwave” on my behalf, was even more delusional. After fretting that “our sorry situation” was making the Really Useful creative team look bad, he put forward his modest proposal. Wouldn’t it be fabulous, he suggested, if I took over for Glenn Close in the Los Angeles production when she went to open as Norma on Broadway? He dismissed the “snide” piece about my performance in the Hollywood Reporter because it was, after all, just a trade paper, and declared that it would be a “real career move” and a “coup” for me. He suggested that we meet over lunch in a quiet location to discuss the proposal after I had digested the idea. In a few days, he would call me or I should call him and this time he ended the letter with “All my love, Andrew.”

  After letting me get fired in a gossip column, he was asking me to replace the actor to whom he had given my role. If there could have been a bigger slap in the face, I’m not sure what it would have been. Nevertheless, Andrew was apparently mystified that I didn’t think his “brainwave” was a fabulous idea. I believe my response to these two letters was, “Go shit in your hat. I wasn’t born yesterday.” It’s what I thought but only said out loud to a couple of friends.

  He tried to get away with the same bullshit in the press. “This is more a personal humiliation for me than it is for her,” he told Baz Bamigboye in the Daily Mail.

  “The whole decision was taken out of my hands,” he declared to the Evening Standard in March. Really Useful “has only ever owned half of the show. The rest belongs largely to Paramount Pictures, who made the original movie.… Paramount flatly refused to put up their half [of the $12 million Broadway budget] if Patti plays the lead. They want Glenn Close. It’s as simple as that.”

  “We were all handpicked by Mr. Lloyd Webber,” I said at the time, “and all of a sudden you’re telling me somebody is telling Mr. Lloyd Webber what to do? No one in the American and British theatrical communities believes that one.”

  Paramount itself was quick to call bullshit on his trying to dodge culpability for his actions. “All creative decisions were made by Andrew Lloyd Webber,” stated Paramount spokesperson Cheryl Boone Isaacs to the Los Angeles Times. “Paramount had no conversations with him about casting. It was all in his court.”

  After the story broke, Andrew’s press man told the New York Times that Glenn Close was concerned that she “not be seen as some kind of Eve Harrington, the backstabbing opportunist from All About Eve.” Well, if you don’t want to be seen that way, pick up a phone and tell me how terrible you feel about all this. Which she never did. Never.

  Do I think Glenn Close was complicit in what happened to me? Hard to say. But what I do know is that from the time she was announced in April, I never heard from her. No “Good luck from one Norma to another,” no “Congratulations on your opening,” no “I’m sorry for what happened to you, but I had nothing to do with it.” Nothing. You might think it would have been common courtesy, if nothing else. When it was announced that Betty Buckley was going to take over for me in London, I called her to wish her well. After I’d been dropped from the New York cast, Betty went public right away with her opinion that I’d been badly treated. “What happened to Patti is an inanity,” she told the Sunday Mail in late February. “She must feel a tremendous hurt. It is the big business machine that rolled over her.”

  I heard from other friends as well. “I want you to know that I am horrified by the way you are being treated, and sickened by the situation altogether,” wrote Trevor immediately after the news broke. “Never in my professional experience have I known such an appalling breakdown of communication and disregard of humanity.… I am angry on your behalf.”

  I was incredibly angry at several members of the creative staff involved in the production, including Don Black, John Napier, and Christopher Hampton, because their silence had been so overwhelming when the firing first happened. Finally John Napier showed up in my dressing room. “Where the hell have you been?” I asked him. “Why do you show up now?” He claimed ignorance. John, John, John. The only person who was any comfort besides Bob Avian was costume designer Anthony Powell. He is a gentleman and such a compassionate human being.

  I felt they abandoned me. Were they embarrassed for me? Did they just not care? A couple of weeks later, Trevor wrote back about this very subject:

  This stinking situation envelops us all, and I understand entirely why you should think that nobody has been your ally. But let me say honestly to you that at no time during the period in Los Angeles and before seeing you on my return did I discuss the New York situation, nor was I consulted for my opinion�
��.

  I wrote a letter to the management group acknowledging that it was not my place to be the decision maker when matters of large scale finance were involved, but that it was my role to remind those concerned of their responsibilities and the humanity that was required in the situation in which they found themselves. I insisted that the first priority on their deliberations must be considerations for your position and the protection of your achievement and status while they were deciding what to do. I repeated in my letter several times that you were our star, and the talent on whom the London show was altogether based.

  I was assured verbally that nothing would be done without your interests being their priority. I left messages for Patrick McKenna saying that I thought it was unforgivable that rumours were circulating in the profession and in the press.

  I am now about to start rehearsing in London with half a new cast, knowing that the pallor of unhappiness and the whiff of moral inadequacy hang over the enterprise….

  Your talent is giant, your heart even bigger, and what you bring to audiences is never less than the real thing, every element taken to the limit. It won’t help you at the moment to know that I believe in you, that your colleagues in the show all believe in you, that your audiences believe in you—because we haven’t been hurt the way you have. But we do all believe in you, and you must, must, MUST continue to believe in yourself. Nothing else matters.

  Paradoxically, I think I was a better Norma after I got fired. The Philadelphia Inquirer had said I wasn’t crazy enough. They should have seen me during that last month.

  My performance got quite deep and bitter. Not crazy enough? No “sense of holding on by a thread”? No “white hot purity under that ragingly destructive fire”? Not anymore. Everything that had happened to Norma Desmond now became more personal. There’s a scene in the show where Norma is looking at her old movies, and she has a line about being discarded. I owned that line now.