Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  The Morosco was located at 217 West Forty-Fifth Street. Right next door, at 209, was the 603-seat Bijou, the smallest theater built by the Shuberts. It was never a desirable theater.

  The playwright John Guare and his wife Adele Chatfield-Taylor, who served on the New York City Landmarks Commission, were appalled that three historic Broadway theaters were to be sacrificed for the Portman Hotel. They contacted their friend Roberta Brandes Gratz, a journalist who covered urban planning. “Oh, Bertie, you’ve got to write about this,” they said. “No one is paying any attention.”

  Gratz’s article—“Save the Helen Hayes”—appeared in the November 19, 1979, issue of New York magazine. “Do we really have to destroy three good theaters and give away millions of dollars to get this hotel built?” she asked. She quoted Stephen Sondheim, then the president of the Dramatists Guild, who said the theaters were “intimate houses,” well suited to nonmusical plays. “They have an atmosphere you seldom get in the new theaters. It’s less tangible—a sense of continuity and tradition. Like the patina of an old painting.”

  But Koch officials made it clear to Gratz that they were not interested in the plight of old theaters. “Implicit in the beginning was our willingness to accept demolition of the Helen Hayes,” said Kenneth Halpern, director of the Mayor’s Office of Midtown Planning and Development. “We were looking to do whatever was necessary to get the hotel built.”

  Gratz’s article galvanized the theater community against the destruction of the theaters. “You have to understand,” she recalled, “the New York Times was not covering this story. From the Times’s point of view, the hotel was going to lead to the rebirth of Times Square.” The Municipal Art Society, which had led the fight for historical preservation, didn’t raise any objections to the destruction of the theaters, either. One of its most influential members was Fred Papert, an early champion of cleaning up Times Square.

  Gratz went to Papert and said, “Fred, how can this be happening? We can’t lose these theaters.”

  “Roberta, leave it alone,” he responded. “It will be fine.”

  But she didn’t. After her article came out Lenore Loveman and Sandy Lundwall formed the Save the Theatres campaign. Colleen Dewhurst, the president of Equity, became a fierce advocate for the theaters. Some of the biggest names on Broadway—Jason Robards, Tony Randall, José Ferrer, Celeste Holm, Tony Roberts, Christopher Reeve, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lauren Bacall, James Earl Jones—joined her.

  Bernard Hughes, who’d starred in Da at the Morosco, wrote an impassioned editorial in the New York Times. Forty-Fifth Street, he wrote, “was the quintessential Broadway street,” a collection of theaters that housed musicals, comedies, and straight drama “thriving in proximity.” To those who believed the hotel would help wipe away the sleaze on the streets, he protested: “After playing 549 performances of Da at the Morosco, I have a right to take that last crazily expedient statement personally. For the business of those streets is my business. They do not contain a single porno shop or massage parlor.”11

  The campaign to save the theaters got a spectacular boost when Joe Papp joined the fray. He was, Gratz said, a bit late to the game, but he played it with the showman’s flair for publicity.

  He started by requesting a meeting with the mayor.

  “We’re on opposite sides of this issue,” he told Koch, “but I need something from you. I have a flatbed truck, but I need a permit so that we can park it in front of the theaters and use it to make our case to passersby. We will not use it to denounce you. We’re going to talk about saving the theaters.”

  “Sure,” Koch said, and issued the permit.

  As soon as Papp climbed on top of his flatbed truck, he shouted into his bullhorn, “Shame on Ed Koch!”

  “You know, on reflection and the passage of time, you forgive everybody,” Koch said many years later. “I forgave him because he was an extraordinary asset for the city of New York, and he was a genius.”

  The battle to save the theaters wore on for two years. Papp and Actors’ Equity mobilized their supporters, with actors standing on the flatbed truck talking about the importance of the theaters and acting out scenes from the great plays once performed on their stages. The papers and local news shows covered the protests almost every day. Papp and other famous theater people were carted off to jail for acts of civil disobedience. They were, of course, immediately released. Shirley Herz, a press agent, said everybody got on well with the police, who thought the actors were great fun to have in the paddy wagons, especially when they led everybody in songs from old musicals. Phil Smith, walking by the protesters one morning, saw Papp being arrested. Smith then caught a train to Washington, D.C., for an event at the National Theatre. At the dinner later that night, he was surprised to see Papp at his table.

  “I thought you were arrested today, Joe?” he asked.

  “Oh, I have a deal with the police,” Papp said. “They arrest me first—and release me first.”

  Behind the scenes, aided by money from the J. M. Kaplan Fund (which was set up by the former owner of Welch’s Grape Juice and run by his daughter, Joan Davidson), the Save the Theatres campaign brought a number of lawsuits, many concerning the environment, against the city to stop the destruction of the theaters. Every time the bulldozers closed in on the theaters, there were more lawsuits and injunctions. The group also commissioned architect Lee Harris Pomeroy to come up with a plan to incorporate the theaters into the design of the hotel. Portman and the city rejected that proposal as too costly.12

  As they watched the battle unfold, the Shuberts and the League of New York Theatres and Producers seethed. No one was more furious than Schoenfeld, who’d made it his mission to clean up Times Square. He argued that the three theaters were obsolete because they were not big enough to house musicals, which were what the public wanted. His opponents countered that the Shuberts didn’t care if the theaters were torn down because they hadn’t owned them in years. Lester Osterman, a producer, owned the Hayes and the Morosco. His booker was Leonard Soloway. “The truth is, the Hayes was hard to book because it had a second balcony,” said Soloway. “The Morosco, though, was a very good house for straight plays.” As for the Bijou, the joke around Broadway was that if you wanted to deep-six a show, you’d stick it there.

  The Shuberts’ adversaries also said they didn’t care about three historic playhouses because they were angling to manage the new musical house in Portman’s hotel. And, in fact, Schoenfeld asked Michael Bennett, set designer Robin Wagner, and lighting designer Jules Fisher to come up with their dream theater, which he presented to Portman. But the Shuberts had competition. Jimmy Nederlander was making a bid to run the theater.

  Schoenfeld worked the press as aggressively as Papp did. He met with the editorial boards of the major papers, most of which supported the hotel. Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic for the Times, handed Schoenfeld a victory when he wrote, “We may well be faced with the choice between the Portman design or no hotel at all. And as important as the Helen Hayes and the Morosco are, they are not, in the view of this critic, enough by themselves to justify the scrapping of the entire project.”

  Schoenfeld convinced Helen Hayes, whose very own theater was in peril, to come out in support of the hotel. But when she did, her actor friends pressured her to change her mind. In the end, she waffled, saying “I’m torn between sentiment and good sense. That’s all I can say—you’ve come up with someone with no position.”13

  Schoenfeld attended every city hearing on the Portman Hotel and the fate of the theaters. His disdain for his opponents was palpable.

  “He couldn’t bear to look at any of us,” Gratz recalled. “He was annoyed by any opposition. The arrogance of power was well exhibited in Jerry Schoenfeld.”

  During the battle, Alex Cohen, who initially supported the hotel, switched sides, pressured, his friends said, by his wife, Hildy Parks. He joined Papp on the flatbed truck and denounced the Shuberts for trying to wipe away theater
history. Schoenfeld and Jacobs were furious. They’d been friends with Cohen for years. His office was above theirs in the Shubert Theatre. They’d even given him parking privileges in Shubert Alley. They cut him dead.

  Schoenfeld didn’t shy away from public confrontations with his opponents. Outside the Plymouth Theatre one night before a performance of Nicholas Nickleby, playwright David Mamet accosted him: “You call yourself a producer, but you don’t know how to create anything. All you know how to do is destroy!” “And you don’t know how to write plays!” Schoenfeld snarled, referring, perhaps, to The Water Engine / Mr. Happiness, which had flopped earlier at the Plymouth.14

  Resentment toward the Shuberts had been building in the theater community even before they began advocating for the demolition of the theaters. Schoenfeld and Jacobs had amassed power over union negotiations, the TKTS Booth, ticketing, real estate, Michael Bennett. The Shuberts were richer than ever from A Chorus Line and had just produced another hit, Dreamgirls, which looked poised to sweep the Tony Awards in 1982. Schoenfeld and Jacobs were not shy about exercising their power. As Jacobs told Breglio, “We don’t need producers anymore. We have everything right here—money, theaters, talent. All we need are good general managers.”

  Some of the resentment stemmed from jealousy. In the theater, as David Merrick once said (perhaps by way of Gore Vidal), “It’s not enough that I should succeed—others should fail.”

  Bob Fosse, in particular, envied the success of Dreamgirls.

  “How is that flop show of yours?” Fosse asked Jacobs at a party shortly after Dreamgirls opened.

  “Bobby, which flop show? I have so many of them,” Jacobs replied, laughing.

  “You know that piece of garbage Michael Bennett did.”

  “Piece of garbage that Michael Bennett did? Did you read Frank Rich’s review?”

  “I never read Frank Rich,” Fosse said.

  “Well, if you read Frank Rich you would know that the torch had passed from Jerome Robbins to Michael Bennett—and you didn’t get a chance to touch it on the way!”

  But the battle against the Shuberts to save the Bijou, the Morosco, and the Hayes was serious. The actors on the barricades believed in their cause. Hundreds of years of theater history were in danger of being destroyed. The Shubert Organization was on the wrong side of the fight. Schoenfeld and Jacobs were putting real estate above history and art. It was easy to paint them, as Joe Papp did, as “greedy landlords.” Or, as Breglio put it, “they were starting to be seen as the Evil Empire.”

  As the fight reached its climax in the spring of 1982, many on Broadway looked to strike back at the Evil Empire.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  And the Winner Is . . .

  Just about the only person in the theater world not preoccupied with the fate of the Helen Hayes and the Morosco was Tommy Tune. He had a show to put on.

  The show, a musical version of Fellini’s 81/2—about a famous Italian film director on the verge of a nervous breakdown—came to Tune’s attention in the form of a cassette tape pushed through his mail slot. He was living at 145 West Fifty-Fifth Street, 13A (Bennett’s old apartment), when the cassette dropped from the slot. A handwritten note accompanied the tape: “I’m your upstairs neighbor, and I’m working on my musical version of 81/2. I call it Nine.”

  Tune knew the movie. He chuckled to himself, “And we’ll love him even more because he’s grown by half an inch!” The note was signed by Mario Fratti, who was writing the script. The score was by Maury Yeston, a professor of music at Yale. He had been working on the show since 1973. The tape was of a workshop in 1979 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. Tune threw the cassette into his weekend bag and headed out to Fire Island. The next morning he went for a walk on the beach. He put on his Walkman headphones and listened to the tape. The first thing he heard was a sweeping, gorgeous overture played on the piano. It was called “Overture delle Donne.” Tune envisioned a bath house in an elegant European spa. He’d been looking for a show to direct. He had found it.

  “I had to do it,” he recalled. “I had to do it.”

  To produce the show, Tune turned to his boyfriend, Michel Stuart, one of the original cast members of A Chorus Line. Other members of the team included Thommie Walsh, who would assist with the choreography, and writer Arthur Kopit, brought in by Tune to rework Fratti’s script. Kopit was represented by ICM, headed by the powerful agent Sam Cohn.

  Cohn liked the score, too, and convinced Paramount Pictures to put up $150,000 for a workshop.

  In addition to his producing responsibilities, Stuart would design the costumes. Walsh thought Stuart needed an assistant. He suggested a friend, William Ivey Long, a young designer who had recently graduated from the Yale School of Drama. But Long turned down the job “with tears in my eyes,” as he recalled, “because I didn’t want to be anybody’s assistant.” He went on to design the costumes for James Lapine’s play Twelve Dreams at the Public Theater. The day before the first preview, Walsh called him and said he was bringing Tommy Tune to see the show the next day. The set was all white, and Long had designed several glamorous costumes, including a black velvet gown in which Carole Shelley made her entrance. Tune only stayed for the first act. Long never found out what he thought of his work.

  But a few weeks later, in early December, he received a phone call.

  “Can you measure all the girls today, and also do a shoe tracing?” the caller wanted to know.

  “Excuse me, who is this?” Long asked. “What show is this?”

  “This is for Nine the musical,” said the caller, who identified himself as the stage manager. “We’re rehearsing on top of the New Amsterdam Theatre.”

  “Would you look at the call sheet and tell me what my job is?” Long said.

  “You’re the costume designer.”

  Stuart, Long later learned, was overwhelmed raising money for the show. He never had time to do the costumes. Tune decided Long should do them, though nobody bothered to tell him. Nine was being thrown together, with minor details such as offers, contracts, schedules—even rights—being overlooked.

  Long took his tape measure to the New Amsterdam Theatre on Forty-Second Street to begin designing costumes that, it seemed, “had been an afterthought.”

  • • •

  The New Amsterdam Theatre, an art nouveau palace built by the vicious Abe Erlanger in 1903, had a storied past. Its most famous productions had been Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies, which played the New Amsterdam from 1913 until 1927. Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Ed Wynn, and Eddie Cantor graced its stage. With its orchestra, two balconies, and twelve spacious boxes, the theater could seat 1,750. Elaborate vines and flowers, molded from emerald-green porcelain, covered the auditorium. The art nouveau elegance extended throughout the building. In one lounge was an enormous, elaborately carved Irish marble fireplace. A ceiling dome supported by twelve marble columns capped the smoking room.

  Atop the New Amsterdam was a six-hundred-eighty-seat theater initially called the Aerial Gardens and later, the Frolic. It was here that Ziegfeld produced his Midnight Frolics starting in 1915, the last in 1929. After the Follies concluded in the ground-floor auditorium, the well connected retreated upstairs for dinner, dancing, and more risqué entertainment. On any given night the audience might include Diamond Jim Brady, William Randolph Hearst, various Astors and Vanderbilts. With dancing, eating, drinking, and a show, the Frolic became New York’s first nightclub, according to theater historian Ethan Mordden.1 But since most of the profit came from the bar, the Frolic was done in by Prohibition. The Aerial Gardens became a playhouse, but it struggled to compete with larger theaters during the Depression. It eventually became a radio studio, then a television studio, and, finally, rehearsal space for Broadway shows.

  By 1980, both the Aerial Gardens and the New Amsterdam were in disrepair. The main auditorium had been a movie house for many years, its twelve art nouveau boxes ripped from the walls to improve sightl
ines. Gone, too, were most of the emerald-green porcelain vines and flowers. Murals in the lobby depicting scenes from Shakespeare, Wagner, and Faust had been painted over long ago.

  The Aerial Gardens—now called the New Amsterdam Roof—also had been stripped of its decor. The blue velvet seats were still there, though they were rotting and smelled of mold. The windows had been painted black. But the paint was peeling and shafts of light shot into the decrepit theater. There were holes in the walls and a gaping hole in the ceiling. The wind howled through the theater, and snow fluttered onto the stage.

  “It was a very Miss Havisham kind of place,” said Long. The first thing he saw when he arrived were several women sitting on the stage—a tall, angular Karen Akers; a buxom, fiery redheaded Anita Morris; a raven-haired beauty named Shelly Burch; and a rail-thin, temperamental former Folies-Bergère performer named Liliane Montevecchi. The only man in the cast was Raul Julia, whom Long knew from his performances at the Public Theater in Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Threepenny Opera.

  Initial drafts of Nine had several male characters (as there are in the movie), but Tune hit on a daring idea. The show was about Guido Contini and all the women in his life—his mother, his wife, his lovers, his producer, the whore who seduced him as a boy. There would be four boys playing young Guido and his friends, but Raul Julia would be the only adult male in the cast. He would be surrounded by twenty-one women. Nine, Yeston would later say, “became an essay about the power of women by answering the question, ‘What are women to men?’ ”2

  Because it was freezing in the New Amsterdam Roof, the women wore winter coats. Long noticed they each had their own box on stage made out of wood. Tune explained, “I love putting things in the way, so I have to choreograph around them. An empty stage scares me.” The boxes, Tune said, represented each woman’s world on which Guido would alight—like a bee gathering pollen. Long was baffled, even more so when he watched some of the rehearsal. Yeston, a bundle of energy, was there, writing songs to order. Melodies, beautiful, elegant melodies, poured out of him. If you needed one song, he’d give you three. You could take your pick. But the script was all over the place, and there was barely a second act.