Patti LuPone

by Patti Lupone

  Daniel Benzali, my Max onstage, gave me a blow-up doll of Edvard Munch’s The Scream that lived outside of my dressing room door for the rest of the run. It was a fait accompli. I had to keep moving forward, defuse the pain, eke out some laughs, and play the play eight times a week.

  It took a long time, but eventually I let it all go. I’ve never been one to hold a grudge. I mean, you have to move on with your life, right? (Oh, did I mention Glenn Close never, ever called me?)

  As my involvement with Sunset Boulevard was ending, it often felt as though the gods were playing jokes on me. Just days before my last performance, I was nominated for another Olivier Award—for the role from which I’d been fired. And I don’t believe the category was Best Actress Who Stinks in a Leading Role. I lost to Julia McKenzie, who was brilliant in Sweeney Todd, but to be nominated was vindication enough.

  Matt and me in London at the Olivier Awards for Sunset Boulevard, 1994.

  Finally it was down to the last day. I’d been very specific with the producers. I didn’t want anyone from Really Useful Group or Patrick McKenna or Andrew anywhere in the theatre on my closing night. They honored that.

  I am very possessive of my theatre memories, and closing Sunset Boulevard in London is still a special memory for me. It was incredible agony, because there was both a matinee and an evening performance. Both were sold out, and then some. The house was chock full to the rafters. Scalpers outside the Adelphi were asking a fortune for seats—and they were getting it. The Theatre Gods continued their merry pranks. During the matinee, the set came to a screeching halt. The Paramount Studio slides would not open for the next scene. The show was stopped. We waited for a bit and then I instinctually stepped in front of the slides in my beautiful Anthony Powell Paramount suit and sang a Depression-era Victor Young/Ned Washington song called “A Hundred Years from Today.”

  Life is such a great adventure

  Learn to live it as you go

  No one in this world can censure

  What we do here below

  Don’t save your kisses, just pass them around

  You’ll find my reason is logically sound

  Who’s going to know that you passed them around

  A hundred years from today

  Why crave a penthouse that’s fit for a queen

  You ‘re nearer heaven on Mother Earth’s green

  If you had millions what would they all mean

  A hundred years from today

  So laugh and sing

  Make love the thing

  Be happy while you may

  There’s always one

  Beneath the sun bound to make you feel that way

  The moon is shining and that’s a good sign

  Cling to me closer and say you’ll be mine

  Remember darling, we won’t see it shine

  A hundred years from today

  The song ended and the slides tracked offstage. The play resumed. At the evening performance the gods played their biggest practical joke on me. The fire alarms curiously went off backstage before the show. And there were more technical difficulties with the set. This time the house wouldn’t descend on my entrance. I was in place, having said the line “You there. Why are you so late?” The music started to play and the house remained still; it just wouldn’t move. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I looked up to heaven and asked, Why? I was laughing at this point. It was a good four or five minutes before anyone acknowledged that there might be an issue. The assistant director came onto the stage and told the audience, “We’re having problems. Everybody have a drink on the house.” At the bar, the rumor quickly spread that technical difficulties had nothing to do with it. The buzz was that I wasn’t coming out until I got another million from Andrew Lloyd Webber. If only.

  The crew sorted out the house. It and I descended to a raucous ovation that went on for several minutes. There was no way to continue—I had to turn around and acknowledge the ovation before they would allow me to begin. The audience stopped the show again for five minutes when I sang “As If We Never Said Good-bye.”

  The whole night went that way. It was very moving, but also very difficult for me. In a situation like that you have to be like a lion tamer, a very gentle lion tamer. You must control the audience, but do it graciously, as if to say, Thank you, but we have to do the show now.

  You have to play the play so the audience goes out remembering the performance. You can’t give in to the maudlin sentimentality of it. Nevertheless, there were times when it was all I could do to keep it together. At the end of the show, people were throwing roses at the stage. It seemed like there were thousands of them. The standing ovation at the final curtain was twenty minutes long. In the midst of all this overpowering pain, there was this incredible outpouring of love that I will never forget. I have said that perhaps I went through the Sunset Boulevard saga to have the memory of that closing night.

  14

  A Working Actor, Part 2

  1994–2000

  As Maria Callas in Master Class.

  © JOAN MARCUS

  My final Sunset Boulevard performance in London was on March 12, 1994. I was relieved it was over but I was also depressed, demoralized, and exhausted. I couldn’t wait to go home, but in a bizarre twist of cosmic merriment, I couldn’t get out of London. Everything was packed and ready to go, including those five huge trunks, but just before we got into the cars to take us to the airport, the news reported that the IRA had lobbed a bomb onto the roof of Terminal 4, our terminal. NO!!!

  We went to Heathrow anyway, only to find out that all flights had been canceled, so we stayed at a hotel near Windsor Castle. It turned out to be a lovely but totally frustrating day. We finally got out the next morning. My family and I arrived home in Connecticut and I began to mentally process the Sunset Boulevard experience.

  The show wouldn’t let me go. The song I disliked the most from Sunset Boulevard was “The Lady’s Paying,” when Norma takes Joe shopping and buys him a wardrobe. When we got home I was very fragile, but “The Lady’s Paying” was the one tune from the show that my son, Josh, age four and a half, kept singing with an appetite for endless repetition that only a child that age can summon. It was absurd. The other amusing thing he did with the same regularity was point at me and shout, “Fire!,” as in “fired.” I wanted to shout, “Hey, little man! I was nominated for an Olivier Award!” But it made me realize, Oh boy, this is gonna be a long healing process.

  I had never been in a psychiatrist’s chair until Sunset Boulevard. Excuse me, there was one other time—Juilliard drove me to the chair, but only briefly. I thought the psychiatrist was crazier than I was, so I went back to class. Now I was in a psychiatrist’s chair, on Prozac, my kid was singing the dreaded song over and over, and I started taking everything out on my husband. The experience almost broke up our marriage. Matt finally asked, “Why are you doing this to me?” I had so much pent-up anger, anger that I’d held in for such a long time. I couldn’t unleash my feelings while I was performing, so I unleashed them when I came home, and I took it out on the person closest to me, my loving husband, Matt. People have asked me what I would do if I saw Andrew again. My response is, “It’s not what I would do. It’s what my husband would do.”

  It took a very long time to heal from Sunset. Shortly after we got home, the family went to Anguilla in the Caribbean for six weeks, but even that didn’t start the recovery process. It was not until eight or nine months later that the clouds began to part. I went to Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Arizona, and hiked for twenty-one days. I don’t know what made the difference. Perhaps being alone with my thoughts helped me to heal—that and the Prozac.

  The open wounds closed, but even so, those scars never go away. I know I’m the same person I was before I went into the Sunset Boulevard debacle, and I’m the same person who came out of it, just wounded, bruised, beat up, and bloodied. So actually maybe I’m not the same person. Maybe I’m a little bit stronger for having survived it.
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  Sunset Boulevard was a devastating experience, and it had nothing to do with theatre, nothing to do with the reason I perform onstage. It was something else altogether—one man’s megalomania and insecurity crushing an actor behind deceit and greed. Yes, Patti, it turns out show business can get rough. If only there’d been some clues, right?

  My lawyer, John Breglio, began the difficult task of negotiating with Really Useful for my financial settlement. John had to fly to London, and apparently it took a straight fifteen hours to come to a conclusion. I was prepared to take it through the New York court system and I think that’s what forced their hand to settle. They didn’t want any negative publicity when the Broadway production was preparing to open. In May of 1994, Andrew Lloyd Webber agreed to pay for breach of contract. Newspaper reports at the time were surprisingly accurate. Yes, I got a very large check, but it felt like blood money. I spent it on our house in Connecticut, and among other improvements we built what came to be humorously known as the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool.

  Even with the settlement, the healing process was long because the damage was deep. When Sunset Boulevard opened on Broadway in November of 1994, I was still very lost emotionally. As anyone who has ever been fired from a job can tell you, it is a wrenching experience—all kinds of self-doubt and esteem issues bubble to the surface—and my termination was compounded by the fact that it was so public. I watched the Sunset Boulevard saga unfold very carefully. I took special delight when Glenn got furious with Andrew and Really Useful when they claimed that the box office didn’t fall off when she took her vacation. He does what he does to everyone, it seems. When it closed, I was ecstatic.

  The Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool under construction. The only thing missing was the crime scene outline at the bottom of it.

  I spent most of that year at home tending to my wounded psyche, but the damage seemed to turn physical. Three of us got really ill after we returned to the States from Sunset Boulevard: Bob Avian, our choreographer, came down with shingles while he was rehearsing Sunset Boulevard in Germany; Kevin Anderson—Joe Gillis—got into a life-threatening motorcycle accident; and I found out that both my retinas were severely torn and practically detached. I also lost my voice for a month after a strenuous hike. A vein in my left vocal cord had burst and the cord filled with blood.

  As long as I can remember, I would blow out my voice. Every time it happened, I thought I must have been singing too hard. In a way, I was. I ran into Jessye Norman, the fabled opera singer, after my vocal cord operation. I asked her questions about my condition, and she told me that when women are in the middle of their menstrual cycle, their blood vessels become engorged. In centuries past, an opera singer could cancel a performance or postpone rehearsal if she was mid-cycle. She simply would not sing. But that’s the opera world, not the Broadway world. I doubt many Broadway singers are aware of this condition, or the damage that may occur from singing with an engorged vein. Most likely, I had been singing with an engorged blood vessel and it would burst with exertion—as it turned out, any kind of exertion.

  I found out about the blood vessel five years earlier, when I was doing Anything Goes. I lost my voice and went to my throat doctor. He stuck a camera down my throat and gasped—not a reaction you want from a medical professional. He told me that my cord was filled with blood, and that I couldn’t sing or talk until the trapped blood had subsided. It totally freaked me out, but at the time I didn’t think that this would be a recurring problem. I just laid low and returned to the show when the cord was clear again. It happened again in 1993, when I was in L.A. doing Life Goes On during the day and singing the Westwood Playhouse concert at night. Halfway through my run, my voice was gone. Dr. Hans von Leden got me through the remaining shows but warned me that before I did another musical, I had better get the vein taken care of. He recommended Dr. Robert Sataloff, an otolaryngologist and microsurgeon at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, but I put off going to see him.

  I lost my voice again in London during Sunset Boulevard, and then when I got home from London, it happened yet again when I wasn’t even singing. I went on the hike. I took Advil before I started the hike to prevent a headache. I didn’t know it then, but Advil is a blood thinner, not good for singers. I got home, had dinner, and when I tried to speak I had no voice. When I could squeak out a sound, I called Dr. Sataloff. I went to Philadelphia to see him. Dr. Sataloff is a singer himself, and one of his specialties is care of the professional voice. He looked at my cord, but it was so filled with blood that he sent me home and told me to come back in a month. Now I was scared.

  When I returned to him a month later, he assessed the problem and explained to me what my vocal cord operation would entail. He also told me that it was a relatively simple operation, and that after it I would sing better and sing twenty-five years longer. We scheduled the surgery very close to Christmas of 1994. I remember this because I woke up after the operation to the sound of a baritone voice in the atrium outside my hospital window. It was Dr. Sataloff singing a liturgy. You’d think a hymn-singing surgeon would give one pause, but the operation saved my voice. Apparently I had more than one broken blood vessel in my left cord, and Dr. Sataloff cauterized all of them. Post-op recuperation eventually led me to Joan Lader, who rehabilitated my speaking voice, and finally, after all of my years of singing, taught me how to sing. She gave me technique. I’m still studying with her, and still trying to understand the craft of singing. I can’t imagine what would’ve happened to my voice or my career without her.

  Each time I take a lesson with Joan, I learn something new about vocal technique and how to apply it. Singing is the most natural thing I do, and the hardest thing for me to do naturally. As a kid, I developed bad habits singing along with the radio—habits that were hard to break because they were the only thing I knew and could trust. I muscled my voice to hit the high notes. It’s how I got through Evita. Now I can’t conceive of learning a score without Joan. She is a godsend and savior for a lot of singers.

  I was supposed to return to Broadway in Sunset Boulevard, but that didn’t happen. What did happen was a self-imposed isolation and healing process, both emotional and physical. To be honest, it was wonderful. I loved being home with my husband and young son, but as I was recuperating from my vocal cord operation, I got a phone call from two old friends, Lonny Price and Walter Bobbie. They wanted me to play Vera Simpson in the Encores! production of Pal Joey. I said no for two reasons:

  1. It was still too early in my rehabilitation to sing.

  2. I wasn’t ready to get back onstage.

  But I loved these two guys. Walter said, “Patti, you’ll be hanging out with your friends.” I said I’d think about it. They sent the musical director, Rob Fisher, up to my house to convince me. I gave him lunch and sent him on his way without committing.

  I don’t remember when I said yes, but I finally agreed to do it with Joan Lader’s cautious blessing. I wasn’t totally healed. My voice was fragile but I started rehearsal, and I remember laughing my way through it, thanks to Lonny. There were lots of Sunset Boulevard jokes at my expense. It was a great cast in a great environment—the City Center theatre crew and the Encores! management.

  We had a very limited run in May of 1995. When I made my entrance on opening night, I received an ovation that practically knocked me off my feet. It was a New York audience saying, Welcome home, Patti. This is where you belong.

  I was deeply moved by it. It made me very nervous, but it also closed up some of the holes in my heart and spirit even more. I was so grateful. I thanked the ever-capricious gods that preside over the theatre and my life. I played the play. We did three performances and recorded it. And that was that.

  A few months later, with my voice fully recovered, I returned to Broadway with a concert at the Walter Kerr Theatre: Patti LuPone on Broadway. This was the same show I had done at the Westwood Playhouse as my farewell to L.A. before I was to leave for London and Sunset Boulev
ard. It became my Broadway return. I was happily working again with Scott Wittman as director, Dick Gallagher as my new musical director, and Jeff Richman, who was supplying the dialogue and jokes for the show. Jeff has kept me laughing for the thirty-three years we’ve known each other. The show was sold out and the audience incredibly supportive. Scott made me sing “As If We Never Said Good-bye” from Sunset as an encore. It wasn’t easy.

  One night during the run, I was two bars into the opening number, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” when over the house intercom the stage manager stopped the show and asked if there was a doctor in the house. A man who was sitting in the orchestra was now lying flat in the aisle surrounded by his family. Doctors came out of the woodwork. The houselights remained down and all of us remained onstage, truly lost, and wondering what to do. I went to the stage-right wing. Scott and Vinnie the Nose, the house electrician, told me to stay onstage. I did. Portia Nelson, a friend and colleague, came to the foot of the stage and told me that the man’s name was John and that he was in cardiac arrest. I told the audience. As calmly as I could, I just kept everyone aware of what was going on, for about twenty minutes. There is a firehouse on the corner of Forty-eighth and Eighth, but it took them what felt like forever to show up.

  The family was saying to John, “Come on! Pull through! Come on, John!” The paramedics finally showed up and put John on a stretcher. They left up the house-left aisle with the family behind the gurney.

  I said to the audience, “We’ll take a ten-minute break and start again.”

  From the back of the house a man shouted, “Don’t do it, Patti. Don’t do it. Tony Bennett wouldn’t do it.”

  People turned around and shouted at him, “We didn’t come here to see Tony Bennett.” Then they turned back to me.

  I was dumbstruck. I said, “I’m as confused as everyone else.” The man on the gurney and his family left the theatre. In true New York fashion, four people from the balcony raced down the stairs for the four vacated and still-warm orchestra seats. We took the break. I started the show again and felt a strange breathlessness over the audience. It was totally surreal. We got through the show and I thought that was the end of that.