Downing another vodka, Bennett said, “This is about us. We’re kids. ‘Slow down, you crazy child.’ Vienna waits for us. We’ll do it some day. We’re young. They’re old. They’re all gonna die. They’re all going to die. And then we’ll do what we want to do.”
• • •
With Breglio gone, Bennett needed a new executive producer to run the day-to-day operations on Ballroom. As it so happened, Bernard Gersten, second-in-command at the Public Theater, was about to break from Joe Papp. Gersten had thrown a surprise birthday party for Papp at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Papp arrived thinking he was going to watch a rehearsal. Instead, the place was packed with actors, directors, writers, and politicians. The lights went up, and everybody sang “Happy Birthday.” There were fireworks and sketches and songs about Papp and the Public. The food store Zabar’s provided picnic baskets. Gersten had orchestrated the whole event. And Papp resented it. “I began to think, ‘Wait a second—I wonder how much this cost? And how come I didn’t know about it at all?’ I mean, after all, I’m running an organization. I slowly began to realize that the thing had been done under my nose, without me knowing it, and money—some $40,000, which was substantial at the time—had been spent without my approval.”2
The break came after the party. It was over Ballroom. Gersten thought the Public Theater, raking in money from A Chorus Line, should produce Ballroom. But Papp wasn’t interested. He didn’t do shows that weren’t developed at his theater. Besides, he said, Bennett was now part of the Broadway establishment. He was no longer a struggling artist who needed a place to work.
Bennett and Gersten had grown close because of Gersten’s work on A Chorus Line. Gersten offered to coproduce Ballroom on Broadway. He went to Papp and asked him for a favor. Could he continue to work at the Public but also work for Bennett on Ballroom in his spare time?
“If you do, you’ll have to quit the Public,” said Papp.
“I’m not going to quit,” Gersten replied.
“Then I’ll have to fire you.”
“Then fire me,” said Gersten.
“OK, you’re fired.”
The next day Gersten went to work at 890 on Ballroom—and incurred the wrath of Bernie Jacobs. Every decision Gersten made—advertising, marketing, budgets, ticket pricing—Jacobs questioned. Bennett and Bergman already were fighting, and now the two Bernies were as well. Making matters worse was the fact that, at the box office, Ballroom was a bust.
The Sunday New York Times carried a full page ad announcing: “From the director of A Chorus Line—Michael Bennett’s new show, Ballroom.” “And nobody bought tickets,” said Gersten.
The Shuberts were so sure the show would be a hit, they carved out an extra box office between the Shubert and Booth theaters in Shubert Alley to handle the demand (The space had once been the star dressing room at the Booth.) “We all got crazed,” said Phil Smith. “We thought Ballroom would be the biggest thing since 7 Up. We had four box office people in there waiting for the crowds. Well, the crowds never showed up.” (The Shuberts soon closed the extra box office. It eventually became One Shubert Alley, a shop that today sells Broadway mugs, T-shirts, posters, key chains, etc.)
Jacobs was furious. If the show wasn’t selling, it wasn’t Bennett’s fault. He was the greatest director in the world. It was Gersten’s fault. He didn’t know what he was doing. Only the Shuberts knew how to produce a Michael Bennett show, he insisted.
Breglio went to see Ballroom in Stamford, Connecticut, during its out-of-town tryout. He found a dejected Bennett in his makeshift office in a trailer behind the theater. “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this,” Bennett said. “This is a mess. It’s never going to work. Everybody’s fighting with everybody else. It’s just a catastrophe. I just got to ride it out.”
Ballroom opened December 14, 1978, at the Majestic on Forty-Fourth Street. Bennett masked his doubts about its prospects behind a lavish opening night party at Windows on the World, the five-star restaurant on top of the north tower of the World Trade Center. He ferried Loudon, his star, downtown in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. He escorted her to a private room where champagne and caviar were on ice. “When you’re ready,” he told her, “I will escort you into the main room.” Loudon’s date was her agent, Lionel Larner. As they stood looking out over the Hudson River, drinking Cristal, Larner said, “Now that you’re a star, Dorothy, all this is yours—New Jersey!”
The reviews that night cast a pall over the party. While the critics praised Bennett’s staging, most found the story of the lonely widow dreary and undramatic. The death blow was dealt, of course, by the New York Times. “With someone of the caliber of Michael Bennett in charge, the natural assumption is that he and his authors are keeping their powder dry,” wrote Richard Eder. “The assumption holds for a while. But around the halfway mark the suspicion begins to grow that the powder is never going to be lit at all. And finally it becomes evident that it is not powder, but dust.”
A few days after the review appeared, Bennett got a call from one of his father’s mobster associates in Buffalo. The mobster asked if there was anything Bennett would like to have done to Richard Eder. “It’s a little late in the day for that,” Bennett replied.3
As Ballroom staggered at the box office, Bennett fled New York. He went on a month-long trip to China sponsored by Columbia University. His traveling companions included Robin Wagner, the arts philanthropist Martin Siegel, producer Bill Oakes, Bernie and Betty Jacobs, and Phil Smith and his wife, Phyllis. The trip lifted Bennett’s spirits. Flying from Belgrade to Mongolia, Bennett played soccer in the aisle of the plane with a Chinese soccer team and traded bits of his clothing for theirs. On their first morning in Beijing, Bennett and Wagner awoke at 5:00 a.m. to “an incredible ringing sound,” said Wagner. They went out on the terrace of the Beijing hotel and saw thousands of Chinese on bikes ringing their bells on their way to work. Jacobs, in the room next door, was already up. He was on the phone trying to get through to New York to find out what the grosses were for Ballroom.
Before the group’s first ceremonial dinner near the Forbidden City, Bennett went to a friendship store and bought a Chinese army uniform. He made his entrance at the dinner wearing the uniform, to the cheers of Chinese diplomats. He met with a dance troupe and taught the kids how to do the Hustle from Saturday Night Fever. As the Americans prepared to depart Beijing, the dancers showed up at the train station to say good-bye to Bennett. He asked them if there was anything else he could do for them. Their leader took him aside and said, “Please don’t dance in Shanghai.”
Jacobs continued to monitor the grosses back in New York. Ballroom was falling apart. Toward the end of the trip, Smith was in a hotel lobby when he heard Bennett being paged. Bennett was sitting with Jacobs in a tour bus outside the hotel. Smith went to get him so he could take the call. Bernie Gersten was calling from New York. Ballroom, he told Bennett, would have to close.
Back in New York a week later, Robin Wagner was walking down Forty-Fourth Street to see Ballroom one last time. He ran into some of the dancers. They were furious with Bennett. They felt he’d abandoned them by touring China while they were dying at the Majestic. One said, “That fucker went to China, closed the show, and couldn’t face us.” Wagner thought, They don’t know he did the show for them. They don’t know it’s his money. Nice.
• • •
Though he thought Ballroom would fail, it still took Bennett nearly two years to recover from his first big flop. He eased the pain with drugs and vodka, which fueled his paranoia. He started calling the Shuberts “the Mafia,” and Jacobs “my Mafia godfather.” He told Wagner the Shuberts had planted a bug in his teeth while he was at the dentist so they could listen to everything he said. But he still relied on Jacobs’s counsel, calling him in the middle of the night, often high on drugs and drink. “He called me last night at three, and his tongue was thick,” Jacobs would tell Albert Poland. Jacobs did not know what to do about Bennett’s add
iction. Booze, drugs, and anonymous sex were not part of his world. “Bernie used to say, ‘I don’t go to parties where they have white powder,’ ” said Poland.
The only thing that might get Bennett back on track was a new show. As it happened, one was right under his nose at 890 Broadway.
Tom Eyen, a writer and director, and Henry Krieger, a composer, collaborated on a successful Off-Broadway musical called The Dirtiest Musical in Town in 1975. Their star, Nell Carter, stopped the show every night with a song called “Can You See?” When the show closed on New Year’s Eve 1976, Eyen and Krieger had lunch at a coffee shop on LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village and talked about writing a show for Carter. It would be about three black singers from Chicago, The Dreamettes, who go to Harlem to compete at Amateur Night at the Apollo. Eyen wanted to call it One Night Only. He scribbled a lyric on a napkin while Krieger sketched out a melody. They went to Joe Papp with the idea, and he gave them a six-week workshop. They continued working on the show, tailoring it to Nell Carter. But in 1980 she landed a pilot called Gimme a Break. Papp wanted to wait for her to come back. Eyen and Krieger “didn’t want to wait for anybody,” Krieger said. They took their show to 890 Broadway and with Sheryl Lee Ralph singing, auditioned ten songs for Bennett and Bob Avian. They liked what they heard and gave them rehearsal space. Eyen was directing. If the show was any good, Bennett and Avian would produce it.
To replace Carter, Eyen and Krieger cast Jennifer Holliday, who impressed them in Your Arms Are Too Short to Box With God. When she came in for her audition she had big red circles on her cheeks and reminded Krieger of Pagliacci. Her energy was “weird but she sang great,” he recalled. She would play Effie, the overweight lead singer of the Dreamettes.
Eyen staged two workshops for Bennett. After the second, Bennett told Eyen and Krieger, “I’m going to make you rich. I want to direct your show.”
Eyen was hurt, but “he accepted it,” said Krieger.
With Bennett at the helm, the energy and pacing of the show, now called Dreamgirls, accelerated. Eyen played ping-pong with the actors, taking their ideas, refining them, trying to make them work. That was not Bennett’s way. The show was unfolding in his head, and he was dictating it to the cast. He wanted it to move cinematically, swiftly, barely pausing for the audience to catch its breath. And, with its tale of show business success and excess, friendship and betrayal, he wanted the audience to feel its brutality. Rehearsals could be hair-raising. In a key scene, Effie walks into her dressing room and comes face-to-face with her replacement, Michelle Morris. “Who is she?” Effie demands. Sheryl Lee Ralph, as Deena, was not responding to the dramatic situation the way Bennett wanted. She wasn’t responding to anything. She just stood there, statuesque. Bennett exploded. “Get the fuck out of rehearsals! Get out of the room! You have no fucking feelings! Get out of my life!” Ralph burst into tears. Bennett went over to her, put his arm around her, and said, “That’s what I want, honey. And I want it every night.”
A turning point came one afternoon at 890 Broadway when Bennett prodded Eyen and Krieger to come up with a strong first-act ending. Eyen dashed off a lyric, and Krieger went to a piano in a small studio to set it to music. Krieger diddled around for an hour, but couldn’t come up with anything. He thought the lyric “And I am telling you I’m not goin’ ” was awkward. “I was discouraged because usually everything comes to me really quickly. There was a knock at the door, and it was Ray Stark, the producer. He was filming the movie Annie. He said he was sorry to bother me, but he needed to use the phone in the room. He made his phone call, thanked me, and I went back to work. At which point the song wrote itself.”
Krieger returned to the rehearsal room to play the song for Eyen, Bennett, and Avian. He taught Holliday the song while she was performing it, the two of them singing back and forth. It brought down the house, with Bennett leading the applause.
Bennett was still calling Bernie Jacobs at three most mornings, but now he was explaining his ideas for Dreamgirls. Jacobs was also hearing good reports from his wife, Betty, who attended many of the rehearsals. After the failure of Ballroom, Jacobs had convinced Bennett that he needed the Shuberts as his producers. Dreamgirls would be a Shubert show. But it was expensive—$3.5 million—and the Shuberts wanted to share the risk with other investors. First, though, they had to see what Bennett had put together. A presentation was arranged on the stage of the Shubert Theatre, where A Chorus Line was still selling out. Jacobs, Schoenfeld, and a few key Shubert executives were on hand. An hour before the presentation, Eyen and Krieger were downstairs in the theater at a piano by the men’s room finishing the title song.
Auditioning for Schoenfeld and Jacobs was nerve-racking. Jacobs sat stone-faced. Schoenfeld might smile if he liked something, but he, too, showed little emotion. Around Broadway the two were known as “Mount Rushmore.” Eyen went through the show, with Krieger’s musical assistant playing the piano. Bennett demonstrated some of his choreography. “Quite frankly, no one knew what to make of it,” said Breglio. “You had a lot of big numbers, but there was no production. So it was hard to assess.” But that didn’t matter. Bennett was back in the Shubert fold. When it was over, Jacobs said, “We’re doing it, Michael, and this is going to be fabulous.”
Bennett leapt into Jacobs’s lap and threw his arms around him.
• • •
The Shuberts financed Dreamgirls with David Geffen, who’d met Jacobs through their mutual friend Marlo Thomas. Geffen had also befriended Bennett around the time A Chorus Line opened on Broadway. The two had talked about doing a show together one day. Dreamgirls headed to the Shubert Theatre in Boston in late October 1981. There was tension in the theater the moment rehearsals began. Eyen, resentful he’d been muscled aside as director, clashed with Bennett over the script. Bennett was issuing his usual demands for better scenes and songs, but Eyen resisted. “I’m the writer, not him!” Eyen would explode. Though only three years older than Bennett, Eyen referred to the Tony-winning director as “this kid running around.”
“Tom was a wild, hot-headed Arab-American. He gave Michael the hives, literally,” said Krieger. When they blew up at each other, Avian would take Bennett aside and calm him down, and Krieger would do the same with Eyen. “They were both explosive types,” said Krieger. “When they were happy, it was like the sun coming out. When they were depressed and angry, it was, book me a ticket someplace else.” At one point, Bennett wanted to cut the song “One Night Only” because he thought it was too Jewish (it was in a minor key). He wanted something more contemporary, so Eyen and Krieger wrote a disco song called “Going to Be My Time.” The first time the cast performed it, “there was an insurrection from everybody in the theater,” said Krieger. “Everybody turned on Michael for cutting ‘One Night Only.’ He finally put it back.”
The original poster for the show read: “Michael Bennett’s Dreamgirls.” Eyen saw it and went berserk. “He thought it suggested Michael had written it,” said Breglio, “so we changed it to Michael Bennett’s production of Dreamgirls—which was a huge concession, considering Michael’s stature in the theater.”
There was also tension between Bennett and Holliday. At one point during the workshop, he fired her because she wasn’t acting the role to his satisfaction. But he couldn’t find anyone who sang “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” as powerfully as she did, so he took her to see Lena Horne: “The Lady and Her Music,” then the hottest show in town, bought her dinner, and rehired her. And then she fell in love with him. He led her on. She was under his spell and he could manipulate the performance he wanted out of her. He gave her $100,000 to buy a condominium in New York. Some in the company believed they were sleeping together, but Krieger knew better: “Think about it. She was five thousand pounds and a girl and black.”
Bennett was under tremendous pressure—from the Shuberts, the company of Dreamgirls, and himself—to deliver another hit after the failure of Ballroom. He had a recurring nightmare, which he talked abou
t in a New York magazine profile. Dreamgirls, in “the shimmer of its half-light, became a black-cast Ballroom, a $3 million flop.”4
Bennett invited his friend Larry Cohen, who had moved to Los Angeles, to see the show in Boston. Afterward, he asked Cohen, “Am I the best?”
“Yes,” Cohen replied. “You are the best.”
Bennett relaxed. “Okay, what did you think of the show?” he said.
Cohen thought it was dazzling, but found a “cosmic flaw” in the second act. After being replaced by Deena at the end of Act I, Effie was gone for good. “Bring the fat girl back,” Cohen said. “The audience wants her. No matter how good the second act is, you keep thinking, When am I going to see the fat girl again?”
Cohen’s advice echoed something Elia Kazan said to Tennessee Williams during rehearsals of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In the original draft of the play, Big Daddy was not in the third act. Kazan urged Williams to bring him back. Big Daddy was such a force, the audience needed to see him one last time. Williams wrote a scene between Big Daddy and Brick for the third act that is one of the most potent in the play.
Over the objections of Eyen, who did not want to pander to the audience, Bennett brought Effie back in Act II of Dreamgirls.
Despite the tension among the creative team and the show’s second-act problems, Dreamgirls began to feel like a hit. Marvin Krauss, the general manager, offered to buy out Krieger’s share, including his royalties, for $250,000. Krauss had seen Krieger play poker with the company and thought he wasn’t much of a gambler. But Krieger had been working on this show every day for more than two years. He was not about to sell off his baby to a shark like Krauss.
Dreamgirls opened to positive reviews in Boston, including a near rave from Kevin Kelly in the Globe. Bennett, he wrote, accomplished a “staging concept with the rapidity, if not the fluidity, of the movies . . . . The theater’s sparse and limited vocabulary suddenly finds itself in the wide open library of the cinema.”
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