Kelly and Bennett were good friends, and many believed they had been lovers in the 1970s. Kelly’s review meant a great deal to Bennett, and the critic met privately with him to give more advice on how to improve the show for New York. Kelly’s review circulated in New York. Broadway was humming with the news that Michael Bennett had another winner. Ticket sales began to take off. But Bennett was still nervous. A few days before the New York opening, he told the Times, “This show is not about dancers. This show is about singers . . . . It is not A Chorus Line II. It’s not a black version of A Chorus Line.”
Dreamgirls opened December 20, 1981, at the Imperial Theatre, to a first-night audience that stood and cheered after “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and stood and cheered again at the end of the show, though many felt Act II was a letdown after Holliday’s show-stopping solo. At the opening-night party, Bennett worried about the reviews. He knocked back vodka to calm his nerves. At 9:45 the Times hit the streets. Someone handed Bennett a copy of Frank Rich’s review. “When Broadway history is being made, you can feel it,” Rich wrote. “What you feel is a seismic emotional jolt that sends the audience, as one, right out of its wits. While such moments are uncommonly rare these days, I’m here to report that one popped up at the Imperial last night. Broadway history was made at the end of the first act of Michael Bennett’s beautiful and heartbreaking new musical, Dreamgirls.” Rich then described, in detail, Holliday’s performance of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” Buried in the review were complaints of “a few lapses of clarity” and “overpat” resolutions in Act II. But Rich concluded: “Mr. Bennett has long been [Jerome] Robbins’s Broadway heir apparent, as he had demonstrated in two previous Gypsy-like backstage musicals, Follies and A Chorus Line. But last night the torch was passed, firmly, unquestionably, once and for all.”
Not all the overnight notices were raves. Douglas Watt, in the Daily News, spoke for many when he wrote that Dreamgirls “is all style and no substance.” Walter Kerr, writing in the Sunday Times, would call it “very efficient. It is also, I regret to say, all very remote.”
Bennett phoned Jacobs and Breglio the next morning at 10:00 a.m. He’d been up all night, drinking and going through the reviews. Despite the rave in the Times, he was “terrified that the show was not going to do well,” said Breglio.
Jacobs spoke to him, paternally. “Michael, we’ve got some good reviews. And we’ve got Frank. We’ve got the Times.” Jacobs began to discuss the ad and marketing campaigns, but Bennett interrupted him.
“Cut the crap!” he screamed into the receiver. “Do I have a hit or not? Do I have a hit? I want to know. Do I have a hit?”
“Michael, you have a hit,” Jacobs said. “You have a big hit. Believe me, you have a hit.”
Bennett took a deep breath.
“I’m glad. I’m happy for that. I’m thrilled we have a hit.”
And then he hung up.
* * *
I. It quickly became perverted, however. Instead of a place for creative people to develop a show, the workshop became a backers’ audition. “There are all these people watching to see whether they are going to put money in the show,” Breglio said. “Michael never intended that.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Civil War
In December 1978, Herb Sturz, a deputy mayor, received a phone call from his boss, Ed Koch. The mayor had on his schedule a meeting with Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization. He wanted Sturz to sit in.
Sturz, an able and diplomatic civil servant, had never met Schoenfeld. His first impression of the Shubert chief was of a man whose head was about to explode. Schoenfeld was “up in arms,” Sturz said, over Father Bruce Ritter’s plan to expand his shelter for runaways and homeless kids in Times Square. The Under 21 shelter, which was part of Ritter’s Covenant House network of safe places in the city for homeless teenagers, was located on Forty-Fourth Street near Eighth Avenue, Shubert’s backyard. Ritter was trying to evict some merchants so he could expand his facility to keep pace with the growing number of runaways flooding New York City at the time. Schoenfeld had supported Ritter’s Under 21 shelter as part of the effort to make Times Square safer. But when he saw that it had become a crash pad for druggies who loitered in front of it day and night, he changed his mind. He wanted Ritter and the riffraff out of the neighborhood.1
At the meeting with Koch and Sturz, Schoenfeld angrily expounded that “the shelter, with all those drug addicts, is going to destroy our business. It will scare away our audiences.” Ritter had little time for Schoenfeld’s objections. Indeed, he seemed to delight in sticking it to the fancy Broadway types. He said he wanted to open a soup kitchen at the shelter for the homeless. “My heart rejoiced,” he wrote in a newspaper column, “at the thought of a couple hundred Times Square derelicts lined up in the lobby of the St. James Theatre.”2
Sturz thought Schoenfeld was overstating the case—“I think some of his anger was for show”—but he acknowledged the point. Ritter was running what he thought was a rehabilitation center, but not every drug addict cleans up overnight. In fact, there had been complaints from other merchants in the area about the number of teenagers loitering—and doing drugs—in front of the shelter. Carl Weisbrod, director of the mayor’s Midtown Enforcement Project, also had concerns about the expansion of the shelter. “These kids clearly need [its] services,” he told the New York Times. “But the city has been trying to attract legitmate commercial uses to Times Square.”3
Sturz and Weisbrod found another location for the shelter—Tenth Avenue and Fortieth Street, far away from the Shubert’s stomping ground—and persuaded Ritter to take it. Schoenfeld liked the solution. He became close to Sturz and Weisbrod, often meeting them for breakfast at the Pierre Hotel, or lunch at Orso, Joe Allen’s upscale Italian restaurant on West Forty-Sixth Street. Over these meals, Schoenfeld, Sturz, and Weisbrod discussed plans to continue the rehabilitation of Times Square. The Midtown Citizens Committee, of which Schoenfeld was still chairman, and the Midtown Enforcement Project, had achieved some success. The number of massage parlors had been reduced and the police force in the neighborhood had tripled in size. The half-price ticket booth had driven the vagrants, drug dealers, and addicts out of Duffy Square.
But Times Square in 1980 was not Disneyland. It was still seedy, rough, and dangerous. It was also the last patch of Midtown that had yet to undergo a building boom. In the 1960s and seventies, office towers sprang up along Sixth and Park Avenues. But aside from a couple of office towers, including One Astor Plaza (which housed the Minskoff Theatre), there was little new construction in Times Square. On many blocks the tallest buildings were the old Broadway theaters, which loomed over tenement buildings that housed family-owned businesses such as bars, restaurants, modestly priced hotels, dance studios, acting schools, ticket brokers, souvenir shops, and musical instrument repair stores.
Plans to redevelop and modernize Times Square—and Forty-Second Street in particular—had been put forward since the 1960s. The Broadway Association, a group of Times Square businessmen, drew up a plan in 1962 to rid Forty-Second Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue of the flourishing penny arcades and grinder movie houses. The association wanted to turn ten run-down movie houses into fancy supper clubs and cabarets. Victorian-style sidewalk arcades would run the length of the block on both sides of the street. Escalators would take pedestrians up to latticework footbridges spanning the block. In the center of the street would be “seasonally appropriate potted plants.”4
• • •
Nothing came of the project, however, and Times Square continued its slide into sleaze. In the 1960s and 1970s, two maverick developers, Irving Maidman and Fred Papert, acquired a number of buildings along Forty-Second Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, a block that was even more seedy and dangerous than the one between Broadway and Eighth. They tried to create a neighborhood of experimental, Off-Broadway theaters, along with restaurants, bars, and rehearsal spaces. But w
hen the fiscal crisis hit in the mid-seventies “a chill descended on this small-scale investment activity.”5
But Papert was not down for long. As the financial crisis eased in the late seventies, Papert put forth an ambitious plan to salvage the three-block area from Forty-First to Forty-Third Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues—a neighborhood he called “a garbage dump.”6 Papert envisioned a playland for New York, complete with theaters, theme park rides, museums, and family restaurants. Called the City at 42nd Street, the plan attracted the backing of the Ford Foundation, which supplied $500,000 to get it rolling. The head of the board of directors of the City at 42nd Street was John Gutfreund, managing partner of Salomon Brothers. The goal was to take over the area, condemn many of the old buildings and seedy businesses, and restore or build theaters that would contain live musical shows, exhibitions, and multiscreen surround-sound movies. There would also be a giant ferris wheel from which riders could view all of Times Square. The plan could not be implemented, however, without the support of the city, which could exercise eminent domain to rid Forty-Second Street of its sleazy establishments. The project also came with a steep price tag—estimated to be $600 million. It needed tax abatements and help from the city to secure $40 million from the federal government to purchase parcels of land and begin the restoration of the old theaters.7
The Ford Foundation presented the plan to Mayor Koch at a luncheon at its elegant Kevin Roche–designed headquarters on East Forty-Third Street.
“I remember it very well because it was not a very good lunch,” Koch recalled. “It was very dry tuna fish. They showed me their plan and a model. And the model had a ferris wheel. And I looked at it and said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. This is Disneyland. That’s not what New York wants or should have. This is orange juice, and what we need is seltzer.’ ”
Koch used the seltzer line in an interview with the New York Times. “New York cannot and should not compete with Disneyland—that’s for Florida,” he told Paul Goldberger, the paper’s architectural critic.
Gutfreund and the other members of the City at 42nd Street were furious.
“You’re not going to stop us,” Gutfreund told Koch.
“I’m not here to stop you,” Koch replied. “If you want to use your money, build it! But you’re not using city money.”
Gutfreund, Papert, the Ford Foundation, and the other powerful supporters of the project probably could have raised the money even without tax abatements and federal grants. But they did not have the city’s power of eminent domain. Without it, the City at 42nd Street was dead.
Critics of Koch’s decision said he killed the project because it was not his idea, and since his ego was gigantic—“How’m I doin’?” he always asked voters as he strode through the city—he couldn’t allow other people to take credit for the cleanup of Times Square. But Koch’s famous “seltzer” response was a snappy way of putting something he believed: New York City could never be a planned Utopia. It was a hodgepodge of its history, of its immigrants, of its crooks, artists, dreamers, winners, and losers.
Liberal on most social issues, Koch had swung to the right on economics in the wake of the fiscal crisis. The city, he knew, could not survive without businesses, without corporate headquarters, without Wall Street. His administration, in its early days, was business friendly, offering tax breaks and other incentives to retain or entice companies to come to New York. He also sensed that Times Square was ready for redevelopment. Why not try to attract businesses to the area? He asked Herb Sturz, chairman of the city planning commission, to come up with an alternative plan to clean up Forty-Second Street. Sturz’s plan called for the restoration of nine theaters, most of which had become porno houses, and the construction of a four-tower office complex, to be controlled by Park Tower Realty, which paid $25 million to buy the site. Park Tower hired architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee to design the complex. But as soon as they revealed their plans, powerful critics such as Goldberger at the Times and Brendan Gill at the New Yorker denounced them, saying the buildings were ugly and soulless. Others complained that the skyscrapers would block out the sunlight and turn Times Square into a tunnel. At the same time, politicians representing the west side of Midtown sued the city to stop the plan.
“I never forgave them for that,” Koch said. “I asked them, ‘Why are you bringing these lawsuits against us?’ And they said, ‘Well, if you’re successful and this place becomes gentrified, it will raise the rents for our constituents over in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen.’ Because the area would get better and more valuable, they wanted to stop us. I never forgave them.”
In the end, it would take the city ten years to battle the lawsuits. The salvaging of Forty-Second Street, in the 1980s, stalled out. And so Koch turned his attention to another project a few blocks up Broadway, one that would become the linchpin for the redevelopment of Times Square. It would also pit theater people who had been friends for years against one another.
• • •
In the 1970s, John Portman, an Atlanta-based architect, was considered a savior of the inner cities. As businesses and residents fled to the suburbs, Portman was designing and building luxury hotels in some of the most blighted urban areas in the country—the Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles, and the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center in Detroit. Sleek and contemporary, the outstanding features of these hotels were their soaring atriums and glass elevators. They were open and airy, filled with restaurants and shops. You could stay at a Portman-designed hotel and never have to leave the complex. And that was precisely the point. They sheltered their guests from the dangers of the inner city.
In 1973, Mayor John Lindsay announced that New York would get its own Portman Hotel, to be located on the west side of Broadway between Forty-Fifth and Forty-Sixth Streets. Lindsay believed the hotel, which would cost $150 million, would help spur the revival of Times Square. But the financial crisis of 1975 scuttled the plan, and the Portman Hotel appeared to be another failed attempt to save a neighborhood sliding into chaos and decay. When Koch’s plans to redevelop Forty-Second Street stalled, he decided to revive the Portman Hotel idea. But the cost of the project was now $241 million. To entice Portman back to Broadway, the city offered him a host of tax abatements, tax deferrals, and zoning incentives. The city also pledged to secure federal grants of up to $21.5 million. Portman was pleased. Times Square, he said, “is the most famous area in the country and we had the chance to do something of substance, to be a catalyst for saving the area. You always try something out on the road first, New Haven and places like that, before bringing it to Broadway. Thank God this isn’t a play. Critics can kill a play. But not a hotel.”8
Portman’s hotel would soar forty-seven stories and contain 2,020 rooms. It would also have a fifteen-hundred-seat theater, ideal for lavish, tourist-friendly musicals. Critics complained that it looked like a bunker—“something out of The Guns of Navarone,” one wrote.9 Its lobby was on the eighth floor, high above the seedy streets of Times Square. But, mindful of his critics, Portman’s plan also included a pedestrian plaza outside the hotel. The League of New York Theatres and Producers endorsed the hotel. So, too, did the Shubert Organization. The hotel, designed in part to attract conventions, would be located in the heart of Shubert territory. The company had six theaters on Forty-Fifth Street alone. The hotel would funnel hundreds of people a night into Shubert shows. Schoenfeld became a vocal proponent of the hotel, though he and other producers had reservations about the pedestrian plaza. He feared it would become a gathering place for junkies and hookers. Alex Cohen referred to it as “Needle Park.”
To build this modern new hotel, several buildings from another era would have to be demolished, including the Piccadilly Hotel (whose bar had been a Shubert watering hole for years) and three theaters—the Bijou, the Helen Hayes, and the Morosco. Portman’s plan had always called for the destruction of the theaters. But Broadway was in such bad shape in 1973,
nobody paid much attention to three old theaters that, more often than not, stood empty. After the successful campaign to save Grand Central Terminal from the wrecking ball in 1978, however, urban preservation, not demolition, took hold.
The Helen Hayes Theatre was an architectural gem. Opened in 1911 as the Folies-Bergère at 210 West Forty-Sixth Street it had a glazed terra-cotta facade of turquoise blue, old ivory, and gold. The lobby was white marble. The Beaux-Arts auditorium, with seating for just under a thousand, mixed soft colors of rose, pearl gray, and gold.10 Tenants included George Jessel in The Jazz Singer, Bela Lugosi in Dracula, and Imogene Coca and Henry Fonda, making their Broadway debuts, in New Faces of 1934. In 1955 it was renamed the Helen Hayes to mark the First Lady of the American Theater’s fiftieth anniversary on the stage. A year later, it was home to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, for which Eugene O’Neill won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
Architecturally, the Morosco was not in the same league. It was a straight-forward brick building with a rather cumbersome iron and glass canopy. But over the years, the 954-seat theater, built by the Shubert brothers in 1917, housed some of the most important plays in theater history, beginning with O’Neill’s first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, in 1920. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered there in 1949, followed six years later by Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Richard Burton and Helen Hayes appeared in Time Remembered, Henry Fonda starred in Silent Night, Lonely Night, and Melvyn Douglas played a presidential candidate in Gore Vidal’s brilliant political drama The Best Man. In 1973, Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst appeared in a heartbreaking revival of O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. The Morosco was prized for its acoustics, said by actors to be the best on Broadway.
Razzle Dazzle Page 29