Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  Discussing Goldman’s appointment nearly forty years later, Jerry Leichtling, the onetime Shubert office boy, laughed and said, “Irving Goldman as cultural affairs commissioner is like having Dolly Parton as defense secretary.”

  * * *

  I. Not everything went according to plan, however. Later that day, Minnelli’s agent called and screamed, “Stop selling tickets! They spelled Liza’s name wrong!” Liberman still has his opening night tickets, uncut. They read: “Liza Minelli.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Horsing Around

  The Shuberts needed shows. As luck would have it, one was taking shape some three thousand miles away in the English countryside. In the spring of 1972, James Mossman, a popular BBC reporter, invited his friend, the playwright Peter Shaffer, to spend the weekend with him at his cottage in Norfolk. Driving through the fog, they passed a stable. Mossman told Shaffer he’d heard an “extraordinary story” a few years earlier at a dinner party. A local magistrate told the gathering, “A most awful thing has landed on my plate. A local boy has blinded seventy horses.”

  “Seventy horses? How is that possible?” Shaffer wondered. He knew Mossman was an embellisher, so he pressed his friend. “Well, maybe not seventy,” said Mossman. “Maybe she said twelve or something like that. But that boy did blind a bunch of horses one night.”

  “The story was repellent to me,” Shaffer recalled. “Repellent as an idea, as a theme. And then it took hold of me in a way that I really wanted to account for this, somehow, in my head. It was the enormity of this horror that gripped me. I was thinking about it all the time, and the only way I could lay it to rest was to write about it.”

  Shaffer tracked down the magistrate. The case had been passed on to another judge, she said, and she’d heard nothing more about it. Shaffer tried to locate the boy, but got nowhere. He looked at Norfolk court records, but could find no such case. He checked with the local papers to see if they’d covered the story. They had not. He did find a woman who worked in the psychiatric wing of a local hospital. “She admitted she had heard of the boy,” Shaffer said. “I said, ‘You’ve more than heard of it. You know something.’ But she refused to say anything. And that’s all I ever found out. A boy blinded horses and . . . vanished. There was obviously something enormous behind this action, but, in a way, not knowing what it was, was delightful. It meant I could do anything.”

  Shaffer was gaining stature as one of England’s leading playwrights. He’d had a few hits in London and on Broadway, including The Private Ear and The Public Eye, a pair of one acts about love and infidelity; The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a spectacular epic about the Spanish conquest of the Incas, breathtakingly staged by John Dexter; and Black Comedy, a farce that takes place in the dark.

  Born in Liverpool on May 15, 1926, Shaffer and his twin brother, Anthony (who would go on to write Sleuth), were conscripted during World War II to work in the coal mines. Both had bad eyesight, which meant they could not go down into the mines. They were assigned the grueling task of pulling coal bins along a railway. To keep boredom at bay, Peter Shaffer memorized huge patches of Shakespeare and recited them, in his head, while at work. “It kept me from going mad,” he said. “I’d do Hamlet one day, and King Lear the next.” He learned to write plays, he believed, by absorbing the structure of Shakespearean monologues and scenes.

  At Cambridge after the war, he wrote mystery novels, none of which were published. He moved to New York in 1950 and worked as clerk in the Doubleday bookstore at Grand Central, and then behind the lending counter of the New York Public Library. He wrote plays in his spare time. He returned to London a few years later and started writing radio plays for the BBC. Shaffer’s breakthrough stage play was Five Finger Exercise in 1958, directed by John Gielgud.I

  In 1972, gripped by the story of a boy who blinded horses, Shaffer turned for help to a friend who was a child psychologist. He gave Shaffer a list of reasons why a child might maim animals, but also admitted that the reason might remain a mystery. That’s when Shaffer began to see the play as a psychological mystery.

  He told his favorite director, John Dexter, about his new play. Shaffer trusted Dexter’s theatrical instincts from the day they met to discuss his earlier play The Royal Hunt of the Sun. It contained a scene that depicted Pizarro and his men climbing the Andes. “I hope climbing the Andes and all that won’t be too difficult to stage,” Shaffer said. Dexter replied, “I hope it is!”

  I’ve found my director, Shaffer thought at the time.

  “John was a marvelous, very clever, but a very difficult man,” Shaffer said. “He would always call me dear, but those ‘dears’ could be like daggers.”

  Shaffer’s first draft focused on the boy and his “act of sadism.” There was a psychiatrist, but he had yet to come into focus. Dexter read the draft and told Shaffer to concentrate on the psychiatrist. “Dig into yourself to find the analyst. He’ll unlock the door for you,” Dexter said. It was a breakthrough. Shaffer’s psychological mystery now had its detective—Martin Dysart, the child psychiatrist.

  By this point, Shaffer had decided the boy would blind six horses—“which is quite enough, thank you.” And he had a title, Equus. Dexter began experimenting with ideas of how the horses should be portrayed on stage. He wanted the horses to be played by actors, but he didn’t want the actors in horse costumes trotting around making neighing sounds—“none of that rubbish,” he said. He had the actors study horses. “He wanted them to see the way the horses held their heads, he wanted them to turn themselves into horses without any visual aids,” Shaffer said. “It was John at his most experimental. He was creating an amazing equine image using only the actors’ bodies.”

  Everything had to be stylized. Instead of neighing, the actors learned to make a sound like the crack of bell around a horse’s neck. John Napier, a young designer, fashioned skeletons of horses’ heads from cane, leather, and wire wrapped in silver foil. The actors wore the skeletal horse heads on top of their heads. They stood on skeletal hooves as well. The rest of their costumes were black shirts and black pants.

  To play the psychiatrist, Dexter and Shaffer cast Alec McCowen, who’d received raves for his performance in The Misanthrope opposite Diana Rigg. Casting the role of the boy was difficult, however. He had to be beautiful, remote, haunted, and frightening. One night Shaffer was watching a show on the BBC that featured a handsome boy named Peter Firth. He had the qualities Shaffer sought. Shaffer called Dexter. Without even exchanging pleasantries, Dexter said, “I assume you are ringing about Mr. Firth. I have seen him, too. That is the boy you wrote about, dear,” and then hung up.

  • • •

  Equus went into rehearsal at London’s National Theatre during the hot summer of 1973. Shaffer had written a scene he knew would be controversial. The boy, Alan, has a sexual encounter with a local girl in a stable. They take off their clothes, but just as he is about to have sex with her, he hears hooves smashing wood. As he later tells Dysart, he could no longer see the girl. He could only see his beloved horse, Nugget. “I wanted the foam of his neck. His sweaty hide. Not flesh! Hide! Horse-hide.” The girl flees, and Alan, naked, takes a pick and blinds the horses.

  Dexter put off staging the blinding scene until late in rehearsals. One day at a run-through, he told Shaffer he had come up with some ideas. One thing he didn’t want, however, was nudity. “It’s gilding the lily,” he said. “It’s as if we’re being deliberately scandalous. I’m sorry, but I don’t like it.”

  Shaffer was furious. A naked boy blinding horses in a frenzy was primitive, terrifying, and erotic. Sexuality was an important dynamic in the play. Dexter let Shaffer stew. Finally, at the end of the day, Dexter said he was going to stage the scene. Shaffer and a friend, the stage designer Jocelyn Herbert, took their seats. Shaffer noticed Dexter whispering something to Peter Firth. He’s telling him not to strip, Shaffer thought, fuming. The scene started. The girl fled the stables, and Firth began stalking the horses. And then he ripped off his cl
othes, grabbed the pick, and stabbed the eyes out of six horses. Herbert screamed and grabbed Shaffer’s wrist. “This was the first time we had seen the nude scene, and it was astounding,” said Shaffer. “The tension went up and up and up. It was alarming and amazing and right.”

  Shaffer realized what Dexter had done. He wanted to gauge the impact of the nudity, but if Shaffer, his audience, knew it was coming, he wouldn’t be shocked.

  “You are a monster,” Shaffer said.

  “Who else was I going to find to try it out on, dear?” Dexter replied.

  A “dear” like a dagger, Shaffer recalled decades later. “Marvelous.”

  • • •

  Equus opened July 26, 1973, to an audience packed with critics. “I thought some people might get up and boo. Or call me obscene,” Shaffer said. Dexter, in a letter to Stephen Sondheim before the opening, wrote, “Equus is going very very slowly but is, I think, interesting and stands a good chance of working as Peter intended it to. Success with the public is another matter. Anyway, as you have often said, who cares?”1

  Clive Hirschhorn, then reviewing for the Sunday Express, left the National Theatre after the opening performance with two friends. As they walked across Waterloo Bridge to go to a restaurant in Covent Garden no one uttered a word. They ordered drinks. Only then could they begin to discuss the play. The next morning the critics called Equus a modern masterpiece. Dexter noted in his diaries that not since Laurence Olivier appeared in Othello had a play caused such a frenzy at the National Theatre box office.

  Broadway wasn’t paying much attention to new shows at the National Theatre in the summer of 1973. The Shuberts may have been vaguely aware of Equus, but nobody from the company flew to London to attend the opening night and grab it for a Shubert house. It wasn’t until September that Equus began to cause a stir in Shubert Alley. And that was because Walter Kerr, the most respected critic of his era, went to London and saw it.

  “The closest I have seen a contemporary play come—it is powerfully close—to reanimating the spirit of mystery that makes the stage a place of breathless discovery rather than a classroom for rational demonstration is Peter Shaffer’s remarkable Equus,” Kerr wrote in his influential Sunday New York Times column. “Mr. Shaffer is the author of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and he may have been trying for just such iconography—a portrait of the drives that lead men to crucify themselves—there. Here, I think, he has found it.” He added, “At once we are lured, with infinite skill, into a psychiatric detective story, the tensions of which account for half the evening’s force.” Forty years later, talking about Equus in his Riverside Drive penthouse, Peter Shaffer pulled out a copy of Kerr’s review. He had underlined the words “a psychiatric detective story.”

  Kerr’s review, as well as the London raves, set off a scramble for the Broadway rights to the play. The flamboyant Alex Cohen, one of the most prolific producers around, was an early suitor. Cohen kept an apartment in London and was friendly with the major producers, directors, and writers. But a rival producer, who hadn’t had a hit in a long time, was looking to make a comeback. Equus, he thought, was the ticket. Kermit Bloomgarden had been a force on Broadway in the forties and fifties, having produced The Little Foxes, Death of a Salesman, and The Music Man. But by 1970 his luck had run out. And his health was poor. His right leg was amputated in 1971 due to hardening of the arteries. He had a steel prosthetic, which his office boy, a teenage Scott Rudin, picked up every morning to have oiled at a shop in Harlem. (Shaffer remembers, “His leg creaked!”) To outmaneuver Cohen, Bloomgarden called his friend Lillian Hellman, whose plays he had produced. She was friendly with Shaffer, and she told him, “Kermit needs this.” Shaffer gave him the Broadway rights. Bloomgarden, no longer as flush as he once was, teamed up with a rich lady—Doris Cole Abrahams, whose husband owned Aquascutum, one of England’s best known makers of luxury outerwear. As they began laying plans for a Broadway production, Bernie Jacobs, having read Kerr’s review, requested a script. He and his wife read it one weekend at the kitchen table in their house in Roslyn. They weren’t sure what it was about, but they couldn’t stop talking about it.

  A New York producer who had seen it in London advised Jacobs not to take it.

  “It’s a homosexual play,” he said. “It’ll never work here. Too gay.”

  “Bullshit,” Jacobs said. “I’ve read it. It’s terrific. We want it.”

  • • •

  The Shuberts got Equus. It opened October 24, 1974, at the Plymouth Theatre on Forty-Fifth Street. Peter Firth came to New York, but Alec McCowen, who originated the role of the psychiatrist, did not. He was living with his companion, who had become ill and he would not leave him. So Dexter and Shaffer had to find another actor to play Dysart. Anthony Hopkins was a formidable young talent at the National Theatre, a protégé of Laurence Olivier. But he’d had a drinking problem and was nearly fired from a production of Macbeth in 1972. A year later he entered AA. He was better, and Dexter had even considered him for the role of Dysart in London. But a lunch meeting had gone awry. “Shifty, spineless, Welsh cunt,” Dexter wrote in his diary. “Has AA helped him? I don’t think so, so once a cunt always a Welshman . . . . At least I didn’t offer him Equus as I had planned.” But by 1974, Dexter had changed his opinion. He offered Hopkins the part in New York. Shortly before the opening of Equus at the Plymouth, he wrote, “Tony Hopkins is on the way to being superb in Equus. He is calm, disciplined, and every word is crystal clear.”2

  Hopkins was unknown in New York in 1974, but the reviews that October morning launched his career in America. Clive Barnes, the chief drama critic of the New York Times, wrote, “Anthony Hopkins, articulate and troubled, is superb . . . . It is a virtuoso performance gauged to a fraction.”

  “Anthony was a nobody at that point,” said Shaffer. “Equus made Anthony a star.”

  Equus was a sensation. The day the reviews came out, the Plymouth box office took in $134,000, thought, at the time, to be the single largest one-day take for a play in Broadway history. For the first year, weekly grosses hit $50,000, unheard of for a nonmusical. The run, though, was not always smooth. Dexter could be brutal to the actors, recalled Dennis Erdman, who understudied Alan. Marian Seldes, playing Alan’s mother, had a tendency to wave her arms around while she was saying her lines. One day, Dexter stopped her in the middle of a scene and said, “Keep your hands to your side, Ms. Seldes. You’re an actress, not Helen Keller’s older, aging sister.”

  When Hopkins left the play, Anthony Perkins replaced him. But Dexter had little patience with him. Perkins was in the habit of looking down while he delivered Dysart’s speeches. “Mr. Perkins, your cock isn’t that long so stop looking on the floor for it,” Dexter snapped.

  A larger problem (so to speak) was that Perkins turned out to be a mediocre draw at the box office. To keep the show running, the producers needed a bigger star. They found one—Richard Burton. When he was announced, lines of ticket buyers formed outside the Plymouth box office. And then Actors’ Equity kicked up a fuss. The play had opened with a foreigner (Hopkins), and Equity insisted that from then on, the role had to be played by an American. The union threatened to veto Burton. Bloomgarden turned to his friend Bernie Jacobs, who negotiated Equity contracts. Could he reason with Equity?

  Equity is an unruly union. Key decisions are made by its council, which consists of seventy-five actors (many, it’s often said, who are unemployed). When a producer goes to Equity to make an appeal, he appears before the seventy-five actors and must field all their questions and suffer through their soapbox speeches. As one producer says, “They’re actors. They love the sound of their voice.” Jacobs privately called Equity “an entire galaxy of lunatics.”

  But on the day he appeared before the council in support of Richard Burton, Jacobs, accompanied by Phil Smith, treated the actors with deference. He argued that Burton as an international star would extend the life of Equus, providing work for the American actors who were in the cast. A jou
rneyman actor at the back of the room raised a hand. “Mr. Jacobs,” he said, “why are you hiring an English actor when many of us in this room could play this part?” Jacobs replied, “Well, sir, I’m sure many of you could play this part very well. In fact, I’m sure some of you could play it even better. But that is not what the public wants. The public wants to see Richard Burton play this part.” Jacobs carried the day, and Equity approved Burton.

  But there was more trouble. Burton had not been on stage in eight years. His recent movies—The Voyage, Klansman, Massacre in Rome—were box office disappointments, and he was in the midst of breaking up with Elizabeth Taylor for the second time. He’d cut back on his drinking, allowing himself an “occasional glass of very special Burgundy,” as he told the New York Times. But he was weary and wondered if he “could command the attention of the audience as I once did.” Still, he told the paper, “It was quite essential that I should go back to the stage now . . . . I thought, if I don’t take the plunge now, I probably would never go back.”

  But he was not on his game. Dexter thought he’d become lazy. Burton admitted to Shaffer he was “terrified.” He kept saying, “I’m such a fake.” Shaffer thought he was “full of self-loathing.” Burton assured Dexter, whom he did not like, that his performance would come together once he got in front of an audience. Dexter decided to test him. Burton’s first official performance was on a Monday. The theater world would be watching. Dexter told him he needed a trial run. So at the Saturday matinee before Burton’s scheduled debut, Perkins stepped aside so he could play the role. The press was not tipped off. “I’ve never been so bloody scared in my life,” Burton later told the Times. “I was trembling.”

  Over the loudspeaker the stage manager announced, “At this performance the role of Martin Dysart, usually played by Anthony Perkins”—the audience groaned—“will be played by Richard Burton.” The audience roared.