Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  Despite its problems, Nine was generating strong word of mouth in theater circles during previews. People were struck by Tune’s swirling, cinematic staging and Yeston’s gorgeous melodies. And they were raving about Anita Morris, though they didn’t know her name. They were calling her “the redhead in the cat suit.”5

  • • •

  The critics saw Nine on May 8, the day before opening night. The show had been “frozen”—theater lingo for no more changes—that afternoon. Another coat of paint had just been applied to the set, something Clive Barnes picked up on in his review in the New York Post: “Nine, which panting slightly and still faintly smelling of fresh paint, skidded in under the Tony nomination deadline last night.”

  After Frank Rich saw the show, Francine LeFrak gave him a cassette of the score. They’d been friends since his days as a writer for Time magazine, and LeFrak had been telling him for months how much she loved Nine. “This was my baby—I was so passionate about it,” she said. That Rich wanted to hear the score again was, she thought, an encouraging sign.

  The night Nine opened, Michael Bennett threw a party at his Central Park South penthouse for a few close friends, including John Breglio and Nan Knighton, who had seen the show.

  “There were touches of genius in it,” Breglio recalled. “It wasn’t all great, but I remember thinking, this is the dark horse.”

  At 11:20 Bennett turned on the local news to see what the television critics had to say about his protégé’s musical. “Nine is an extraordinary show,” said Dennis Cunningham on CBS. “A show to treasure. Tommy Tune has done masterful work. A startling act of imagination, independence, and daring, Nine—”

  Smash!

  The television screen shattered. Bennett had hurled a tumbler of vodka at Dennis Cunningham. The room fell silent. Then Bennett went into his kitchen and returned with two bottles of Cristal. He poured out champagne for everyone and said, “I want to toast my friend Tommy Tune tonight on his success. Here’s to Tommy. And here’s to Nine.”

  At the opening night party, the cast and crew of Nine nervously awaited the reviews. The Associated Press was out, and it was excellent. They’d heard through the grapevine that Barnes, in the Post, was also a rave. But it was the Times—it was Frank Rich—that counted. Jacksina came into the party with an early edition of the Times and handed it to LeFrak.

  “There are two unquestionable reasons to cheer Nine, the extravagantly uneven musical that opened at the 46th Street Theatre last night,” Rich wrote. “Their names are Tommy Tune and Maury Yeston.” He praised Tune as “a man who could create rainbows in a desert,” and said Yeston had written some of the season’s “most novel and beautiful songs.”

  LeFrak’s heart sank, however, when she read on. “For all the brilliantly styled moments in Nine, there are others where stylization curdles into vulgarity of kitsch and camp.” Rich complained that, at its center, the show was hollow, that the creators never made the audience care about Guido or the women “who gnaw at his soul.”

  And then came the punch. “For all his musical inspiration, Mr. Yeston can write pedestrian lyrics,” Rich wrote. He cited, as an example, a line from the song “My Husband Makes Movies”—“No need to carry out this masquerade”—which he called a “standard-issue” sentiment about unhappiness in love.

  LeFrak was stunned. She’d given Rich a tape of the score, and he used it to bash Yeston’s lyrics.

  “It was the worst decision I ever made as a producer,” she said. “I should never have given him that tape. I couldn’t believe I could be that stupid. I was heartbroken. I felt I let everyone down. I never spoke to Frank again. I’ve forgiven him, but I’ve never spoken to him since.”

  The next morning it appeared that Nine, which opened with paltry advance ticket sales, might sag under the weight of mixed reviews. The critics who didn’t care for it echoed Rich’s charge that it was glitz over substance. But concerns about the reviews were dispelled that afternoon by the Tony nominations. Nine received twelve, just one shy of the thirteen for Dreamgirls. The two shows were going head-to-head in several categories, including Best Score, Book, Direction, Choreography and, most crucially, Best Musical.

  In the Nine production offices there were screams of delight. The decision was made to treat the show as if it were a massive hit. Ignore the mixed reviews, the poor advance ticket sales. Concentrate on the Tony nominations. “We decided that whatever Dreamgirls did, we would do it bigger,” Jacksina said. “If they took out a half-page ad, we’d take out a full-page ad. We were fighting for our show, and we were going to blindside them.”

  Up in the serene, elegant offices of the Shubert Organization, there was consternation. Schoenfeld and Jacobs had indeed been blindsided by Nine. The reports they’d heard during previews were mixed, and it was inconceivable that a show that “came out of nowhere,” as Breglio put it, would threaten Dreamgirls, which the Times had anointed the best show of the season. But Dreamgirls was a “soft hit.” The Shuberts looked at the numbers and saw that it was no Chorus Line. A Tony for Best Musical would extend its life in New York and on the road.

  And now it had competition.

  • • •

  Nine had powerful champions, including Daily News gossip columnist Liz Smith, who rallied the town for her fellow Texan, Tommy Tune. Earl Wilson, the grand old nightlife columnist at the Post, was also a fan. He touted the show in his columns. But Dreamgirls had the Times, which showered the show with puff pieces. Nine took another critical hit from Walter Kerr in the Sunday Times, who dismissed it as “a gimmick, top to closing.”

  A few days after the Tony nominations came out, the nominees gathered in the Eugenia Room upstairs at Sardi’s for brunch with the press. Jacksina arrived before her nominees—Karen Akers, Raul Julia, Liliane Montevecchi, and Anita Morris—and noticed that Dreamgirls had taken over the room. “They were all standing in front of the Tony Award medallion having their picture taken and being interviewed and being fabulous,” she said. “It looked like there were seven hundred of them. OK, they got there before me, and they’ve obviously planted their flag on the moon. They were not going to let Nine get near this hootenanny.”

  Jacksina knew she had to make a splash. She went downstairs to the main dining room and asked Vincent Sardi if she could use the back entrance to the Eugenia Room’s kitchen. Sure, he said. Then she waited for her nominees to arrive. She escorted them all upstairs to have their pictures taken—all except Anita Morris, who wore a low-cut green dress and not much underneath. “Wait down here,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” When she returned, she took Morris up the back staircase and into the kitchen.

  “OK, do what I say,” she said. “There’s a table right outside the kitchen door. I want you to jump up on that table and do your Marilyn Monroe thing.”

  Morris did as instructed. She burst through the doors, jumped up on the table, shook out her flaming red hair and said, “Hi everybody!”

  “Well, that stopped the room,” Jacksina recalled. “That low-cut dress, all that white, white skin and all that red hair. Oh my God, she was like a Vegas girl come to life. The photographers turned away from all those seven hundred Dreamgirls people and then they ran over to the table and were fighting each other to get the best shot. And for the next hour, it was all about Anita Morris and Nine.”

  Jon Wilner, an ad executive who worked on Nine, said the war between the shows “affected everyone in and around the industry. I am not making a joke here, but if the Shuberts went to this deli, then the Nine people wouldn’t go to that deli. That’s how bad it was. And it was quite serious. You couldn’t kid about it, you couldn’t laugh about it. You could not walk into the Shubert office and say anything remotely nice about Nine, and you couldn’t walk into the Nine office and say anything remotely nice about Dreamgirls. You had to watch your step.”

  Behind the scenes, the battle was being fought by the generals—Bernie Jacobs, for Dreamgirls, and Sam Cohn, for Nine. They’d known each othe
r for years, and their relationship was, as a reporter for the Times once characterized it, “mutual suspicion mingled with mutual respect.”6

  The battle turned ugly. Rumors spread that the Shuberts had offered Cohn $1 million to delay the opening of Nine until the fall. Another rumor had it that the Shuberts lobbied Con Edison to withhold the extra power allotment that the 46th Street Theatre needed to operate the sets for Nine. Jacobs was convinced Cohn was fanning the rumors to make the Shuberts look like bullies. Cohn denied the charge. He did, however, remind everyone that Schoenfeld and Jacobs wanted the Hayes and the Morosco torn down so the much-loathed Marriott Marquis Hotel could go up.

  Jacobs, meanwhile, bad-mouthed Nine. He called most of the six hundred-plus Tony voters to make sure they were in the Dreamgirls camp. “He lobbied hard,” one voter recalled years later. “He made it clear that, if you wanted to do business with the Shuberts, you’d better vote for Dreamgirls.”

  LeFrak’s office was in the same building as Cohn’s, and she often delivered strategy memos about the Nine Tony campaign to him. “We didn’t do anything without Sam’s blessing,” she said. “We were all novices. We wanted his approval.”

  “The producers of Nine knew as much about producing a Broadway show as I know how to do plumbing,” said Wilner. “And most of the time, they were high as kites. They could only have advertising meetings when there was a nine—it had to be on the ninth, the nineteenth, or the twenty-ninth of the month. And before the meetings, they’d close the conference door and meditate for fifteen minutes. Sam Cohn’s name wasn’t on anything, but he was calling the shots.”

  Cohn would read the memos—and then, as was his habit, eat them.III

  He also fielded angry phone calls from Jacobs. “When Nine closes, I am going to throw the biggest party Broadway has ever seen!” Jacobs bellowed. LeFrak remembered one call during which Cohn turned white. “I believe Bernie was threatening him,” she said. “He was saying, ‘I will never hire any of your clients again.’ I’ve never seen Sam so shaken. He was eating tissue paper, and he set it on fire with a match. Bernie was yelling into the phone, and smoke was coming out of Sam’s mouth.”

  The producers of Nine didn’t, at first, think they could topple Dreamgirls. The Shuberts had a solid bloc of votes that consisted of Shubert employees and other Shubert loyalists. In addition, “there was the sense that we had crossed the Shuberts, and we would pay for it,” LeFrak recalled.

  And then one day she ran into a woman who, she knew, was firmly in the Shubert bloc. The woman, whom to this day she will not name, said to her, “They think I’m voting for Dreamgirls. But I love Nine, and I’m voting for it. Don’t tell them.”

  “That was the first sign there was a chink in the armor,” LeFrak said. “Other than that, going up against the Shuberts was miserable.”

  There were others on Broadway who began to sense that Dreamgirls was not impregnable. The producer Albert Poland was one. Driving along Fifty-Seventh Street one afternoon with Poland, Jacobs began talking about the upcoming awards.

  “When Dreamgirls wins the Tony—”

  Poland interrupted him.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Bernie,” he said. “There is a big Shubert backlash.”

  Jacobs slammed on the brakes. “What do you mean?” he barked.

  “There is a lot of anger about your position on the theaters. And Sam is fanning the flames.”

  • • •

  The thirty-sixth annual Tony Awards took place on June 6, 1982, at the Imperial Theatre, home to Dreamgirls. The atmosphere was tense. Alex Cohen, the wily producer of the telecast, ratcheted up the tension by sitting the Dreamgirls camp on the right side of the theater (facing the stage) and the Nine camp on the left side.

  In other words, one side of the theater belonged to the Jets, the other to the Sharks.

  The Shuberts, who owned the Imperial and could sit wherever they wanted, had a foot in both camps. Schoenfeld was the interloper on the Nine side of the theater, while Jacobs remained in Dreamgirls territory.

  The design awards were presented before the live broadcast on CBS. When Tharon Musser won Best Lighting Design for Dreamgirls, the right side of the house screamed and applauded. Next up was Best Costume Design, which went to William Ivey Long. As he was getting up, someone sitting behind him kicked his seat in anger. It was John Napier, who’d been nominated for his costumes for Nicholas Nickleby.

  But Napier’s turn was next. He picked up the Tony for Best Scenic Design for Nicholas Nickleby.

  Then, a moment later, the Nine camp shouted and cheered Maury Yeston, who won for score.

  The final award before the start of the live broadcast went to Tom Eyen, for his book to Dreamgirls.

  The score was Dreamgirls, two; Nine, two.

  The Tony Award broadcast began with a shot of Times Square and the theme from the I Love New York Campaign. Had the audience in the Imperial Theatre that night not been so focused on the battle between Dreamgirls and Nine, perhaps they would have recognized that their once-dying industry, and their once-dying city, were making a comeback.

  Broadway and I Love New York, on national television.

  But they didn’t care.

  “All we thought about was who’s going to win,” said Judy Jacksina.

  Tony Randall was the host, and he came out wearing an oversize turtleneck and a tan corduroy jacket. “I am a critic, and we don’t dress,” he said to the black-tie audience. After that came a low-key number from a nominated show that had no chance—Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—and then Tony Awards to featured actors, Amanda Plummer (Agnes of God) and Zakes Mokae (Master Harold and the Boys).

  Milton Berle walked out on stage. He was once in a musical satire called Saluta! he said. “And as George Kaufman said, ‘Satire is what closes on Saturday night.’ ”

  There was a loud thud from the wings of the theater.

  “What the hell?” a startled Berle said, looking to his right. Then he turned back to the audience and said, “Don’t tell me they’re tearing this one down, too!”

  The crowd roared and applauded . . . and applauded . . . and applauded.

  Berle calmed them down and said, “The nominees for Best Direction of a Musical are: Michael Bennett, Dreamgirls.”

  There was a quick cut to Bennett, his shiny black eyes wide open, his hands clasped.

  Berle continued: “Martin Charnin, The First, Tony Tanner, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Tommy Tune, Nine.”

  Another cut to Tune, smiling and eager.

  “And the winner is . . .”

  Someone in the audience shouted, “Dreamgirls!”

  Berle said, “Dreamgirls. Big mouth! And the winner is . . .”

  He looked up and said, “Nine! Tommy Tune, Tommy Tune!”

  The left side of the house erupted in screams and cheers. The right side, the Dreamgirls side, sat on its hands. Alex Cohen, calling the shots from the control room, cut to Schoenfeld, who was clapping but not smiling.

  Tune tap-danced across the stage and said, “Well, this is just great! Thank you. I have to do a gesture because words aren’t enough.” He put his Tony down on the stage, placed his hands on his heart, and then threw open his arms.

  “Okay, I’m going home,” he said. “Bye!”

  And then he twirled his way into the wings.

  The next major award—Best Play—went to The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, that joint production between the Shuberts and the Nederlanders. Schoenfeld, Jacobs, and Jimmy Nederlander accepted the award. Schoenfeld said it was “an honor to be producing with Jimmy Nederlander.” Jacobs said nothing.

  The tension in the Imperial was replaced by horror at the next musical interlude: Cher, sitting on an iceberg and wearing a white fur coat and boots, singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” to a bunch of chorus boys dressed as polar bears. Cher started to strip and said, “You guys are so butch!” There never was a
n explanation for why Cher sang and stripped with a bunch of gay polar bears at the Tony Awards in 1982.

  Now it was time for choreography. Ben Vereen opened the envelope and said, “Yeah! Michael Bennett and Michael Peters for Dreamgirls!” Bennett and Peters bolted down the aisle. Holding the Tony aloft, Bennett, looking relieved, exclaimed, “We’re very happy to be here!”

  Dreamgirls picked up the next award: Ben Harney for Best Lead Actor in a Musical. He beat out Raul Julia.

  Another musical interlude followed, this one featuring Ann Miller, pantless, performing “No Time at All” from Pippin. The lyrics were projected on the platform beneath her so that the audience could sing along. Surely Bennett was wincing. This kind of camp, hoary tap dancing routine was what the cinematic Dreamgirls was shoving into the showbiz graveyard.

  The shove came soon after when Jennifer Holliday electrified the audience with “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” Her performance was so thrilling the Dreamgirls camp must have thought they had the Tony for Best Musical in the bag. But the tide shifted again with the next award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. The nominees were Karen Akers, Liliane Montevecchi, and Anita Morris, all from Nine, and Laurie Beechman from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The award went to Montevecchi, clad in a white turban and and a dress with shoulder pads wider than Times Square.

  But after cheers from the Nine side of the house subsided, cheers from the Dreamgirls side erupted when Cleavant Derricks, of Dreamgirls, picked up the award for Featured Actor in a Musical.