The final musical number was from Nine. The producers had wanted Anita Morris to perform the steamy “A Call from the Vatican,” but CBS’s office of Standards and Practices, in the form of two nice middle-aged ladies Jacksina dubbed “Miss Marmelstein and Aunt Pitty Pat,” raised some objections. They saw Nine and met with Tune and Jacksina the next morning in the lobby of the 46th Street. Aunt Pitty Pat opened her spiral notebook. It was, she said, up to Tune to decide which number he would put on at the Tonys. But, consulting her notebook, she said that if he chose “A Call from the Vatican” there could be “no nipple rubbing, no self-fondling of breasts, no gyrating on the box after doing a split, no rubbing of the inner thigh, and no audible sounds of ecstasy.” Aunt Pitty Pat closed her notebook and said, “Thank you very much for your time, and please let us know.” Tune and Jacksina looked at each other and said, “Let’s just do ‘Be Italian.’ ”
During the performance of “Be Italian,” Alex Cohen cut to Betty and Bernie Jacobs. They were not looking at the stage.
Victor Borge presented the Tony for Best Lead Actress in a Musical to Jennifer Holliday. “I want to thank the producers of the show, David Geffen, Bernie Jacobs—I call him Daddy!—and Jerry Schoenfield [sic],” she said. “And I especially want to thank my director, Michael Bennett. He is such a wonderful man, and he has taught me so much about life and the theater. Do you want to fight again?” she added, to laughter from the audience.
Heading into the final award of the night—Best Musical—the score was Dreamgirls, six; Nine, four.
Lena Horne, triumphant on Broadway with her show Lena Horne: “The Lady and Her Music,” presented the award. Backstage during the commercial break she said, “I hope they wrote the winner in big letters because I’m not going to put my glasses on on national TV.” The winner, she was told, was typed in small letters. “That’s not going to work,” she said. One of the accountants who tallied the votes said he would open the envelope, write the winner in big letters, and put it in a fresh envelope. “Oh, never mind,” Horne said. “Honey, I know how to read the word ‘Dreamgirls.’ ”
The Tonys were live again. Horne walked out from the wings, resplendent in a flowing gown. “This is a pretty theater,” she said. “Full of all the sounds of this gorgeous music. I had a ball here in Jamaica. And now the award for Best Musical of the season. The nominees are: Dreamgirls, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Nine, and Pump Boys and Dinettes.”
There wasn’t a sound in the Imperial.
As she opened the envelope, she said, “I hope they printed this big enough to read without my glasses. The winner is”—she looked up, surprised—“Nine.”
The left side of the theater erupted. As the Nine producers bounded down the aisle, Schoenfeld turned to his wife, Pat, and said, “I just can’t believe it.”
Michel Stuart thanked Sam Cohn, “our honorary producer.” Alex Cohen cut to Bernie and Betty Jacobs. Bernie looked grim. He was not clapping. Betty clapped once, turned to her husband and shrugged.
* * *
I. Beatty may have disliked the show, but the gorgeous Shelly Burch caught his eye. He sent word round to the New Amsterdam that he’d like to take her to dinner.
II. He returned a few days later with “a half-assed document,” said John Breglio, who, representing Jimmy Nederlander, first noticed the oversight. “It wasn’t great, but at least they could get the show on.”
III. Cohn’s paper-eating habit was legendary around Broadway. Once, after breakfast with Bernie Jacobs and Phil Smith, he reached for the check. “Where is it?” he said. “You ate it, Sam,” Smith replied.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CAT$
They day after Nine defeated Dreamgirls at the Tonys, Schoenfeld called Harvey Sabinson, the head of the League of New York Theatres and Producers, and demanded a recount. Sabinson had to stifle a laugh. The ballots, he told Schoenfeld, were destroyed by the accounting firm as soon as they were tallied precisely to discourage such disgruntled phone calls.
“Then we’ll sift through the ashes!” Schoenfeld snarled.
The Shuberts were on the warpath, striking out at anyone they thought had a hand in toppling Dreamgirls. At the top of the list was Sam Cohn. For years, he dined regularly with Jacobs at the steakhouse Wally’s & Joseph’s. Even at the height of the Tony battle—when Cohn and Jacobs were screaming at each other over the phone—they continued to meet at Wally’s to hash out business deals. But the day after the Tonys, Jacobs froze him out. He didn’t return Cohn’s calls for a year.
“In the aftermath of Nine—the rumors, the hostility—I was reluctant to deal with Sam Cohn,” Jacobs later admitted to the New York Times.1 “There’s no doubt about that.” Schoenfeld added: “Absent our personal friendship with Sam, we would not have been as affected by the Nine situation. But because we do have that friendship, it cut to the quick.”
In the end, however, the Shuberts had to deal with an agent who represented Bob Fosse, Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close. Producer Manny Azenberg brokered a lunch between Jacobs and Cohn in the spring of 1983. The lunch, though, had to be on neutral ground. Cohn’s territory was the Russian Tea Room; Jacobs held court at Sardi’s. And so the lunch took place at Joe Allen, a popular theater district restaurant. Jacobs told Cohn that “whatever my personal feelings, it’s my job to deal with you.”2 By the end of the lunch, they hammered out a deal to bring Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing to Broadway, directed by Nichols.I
The other Cohen on Broadway—producer Alex Cohen—did not weather Shubert wrath as well. Cohen had defended Schoenfeld and Jacobs against Louis Lefkowitz’s attacks in the 1970s. He and his wife, Hildy, vacationed with Betty and Bernie Jacobs in the south of France. Cohen’s office was in the Shubert Theatre directly above the Shubert executive offices. He even had that most coveted of Broadway perks—parking privileges in Shubert Alley.
But his decision to switch sides in the battle to save the Hayes and Morosco infuriated Schoenfeld and Jacobs. He also seemed to revel in their defeat at the Tonys, allowing the cameras to linger a bit too long on their scowling faces. The friendship frayed. When his lease was up, the Shuberts threw him out.
“They punched a hole in the ceiling and put in a skylight where Alex’s office used to be,” producer Liz McCann said. “Nobody would ever be above them again.”
Cohen had conceived and produced the first Tony Awards network telecast in 1967 and had presided over the event ever since. Every time his contract with the League of New York Theatres and Producers was up, it was renewed without negotiations. Though Cohen claimed the telecast made little money, Sabinson suspected otherwise. The League lost money on the Tonys, but Sabinson had been told Cohen had a “sweetheart deal” with CBS. “But you couldn’t go into his books,” said Sabinson. “He was unaccountable.”
Before the theater battle, Schoenfeld and Jacobs let Cohen do whatever he wanted with the Tonys. “They looked the other way,” said Sabinson. But now they wanted to know just how much he was taking out of the awards. Sabinson, with the Shuberts’ blessing, ordered a forensic accounting of the Tonys. The conclusion of the accountant: “You guys are really getting screwed.” Cohen was getting $2 million from CBS to produce the show, a small portion of which he kicked back to the League. But the League was buying most of the tickets to the telecast and the Tony ball—with prices ranging from $250 to $500—and was losing anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 on the event.3 Cohen claimed he, too, lost money on the Tony ball. But the accounting revealed he was making money every year. Producers who had paid $500 for their gala tickets were irritated one year when Cohen served them kidney pie for dinner. “It’s cheap but tasty!” Cohen said.
Cohen also pocketed advertising money from the Tony Playbill, estimated to be tens of thousands of dollars. Neither the League nor the American Theater Wing, a nonprofit organization that created and administers the Tony Awards, received a cut of the advertising revenue.
There was not
hing the Shuberts or the League could do until Cohen’s contract was up in 1986. But he was a condemned man, and during the 1985 Tony Awards he handed his enemies the rope to hang him with. At a rehearsal for the telecast in front of performers, stagehands, and chorus kids, Cohen suggested that the theme for that year’s show be Fuck you, Frank Rich. Then, before the telecast began that night, he took a swipe at New York governor Mario Cuomo. The New York State Council on the Arts was to receive a special Tony that night and Cuomo had agreed to accept it. He backed out, however, at the last minute. Cohen told the Tony crowd: “The governor of New York hasn’t been to the theater in twenty-five years, and he didn’t want to break his record.”
Theater people criticized Cohen for his attacks on Rich and the governor. The Shuberts told Sabinson, “Let him go.” His contract was not renewed.
He was about to lose another perch as well. He was on the board of the Actors Fund, and produced the TV show Night of 100 Stars to benefit the charity, which looked after actors who had fallen on hard times. The Shuberts and Sabinson suspected Cohen was up to his old tricks with Night of 100 Stars. Another accounting was ordered up, revealing that Cohen made more money on the show than the Actors Fund did. Many of Cohen’s “expenses”—including trips to the south of France—were paid for out of the Actors Fund endowment.
As Cohen himself was fond of saying, “I’ve had a million dollars and I’ve owed a million dollars, and my lifestyle has never changed.”
“Alex was gracefully asked to leave the board of the Actors Fund,” said Sabinson.
Once the closest of friends, Cohen seldom spoke to Schoenfeld or Jacobs again. He died in 2000 with little money in the bank. About the only asset he had was the copyright to the Tony Awards telecasts he had broadcast from 1967 to 1986.
• • •
Though there was acrimony in the air in Shubert Alley, it was time, after the Tonys, to get on with business. And Schoenfeld and Jacobs were about to make the biggest bet in the history of the company. They had secured the North American rights to a new musical from London and were getting it ready for New York in the summer of 1982. With a budget of $4.5 million, the show would be the most expensive in the history of Broadway. The Shuberts were putting up 40 percent of the investment. Their partners would be David Geffen, ABC Entertainment, and Metromedia. Two other partners would be the show’s boyish producer in London, Cameron Mackintosh, and its composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Jacobs first heard about the show—Cats—when it began previews at the New London Theatre in May 1981. Tyler Gatchell, a Broadway general manager who had worked on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar in New York, saw an early performance. He tracked Jacobs down in Argentina where he and Betty and their family were on vacation, and suggested they come to London to see a show that, Gatchell thought, had potential. Jacobs trusted Gatchell’s judgment and booked a flight from Buenos Aires to London.
No one in London knew what to make of this new musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber. The idea of turning T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats into a musical seemed, to use a British expression, barmy. Lloyd Webber, a cat lover, grew up with the poems. He reread them around the time he was writing Evita and thought they sounded like song lyrics. As he would later learn, Eliot had, in fact, written them while listening to the popular tunes of the day.
“Which explains a lot,” Lloyd Webber said. “Because I remember one poem, ‘Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat,’ and thinking, gosh—he must have written this to something. I could guess what, but I had to keep myself from thinking that way.”
That Eliot’s poems were like song lyrics was fortuitous, since Lloyd Webber was looking for a new lyricist. He’d written three musicals with Tim Rice—Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita—but the two men were drifting apart. Lloyd Webber was always eager to start a new show. Rice, enjoying royalties from Superstar and Evita, had developed other hobbies. He’d much rather be at a cricket match, his friends said, then at his desk writing lyrics. Rice, in turn, had little patience with Lloyd Webber’s ever-expanding entourage. “I’d love to work with Andrew again, if I can get past his secretaries,” he often quipped.
Lloyd Webber set some of Eliot’s poems to music, thinking Cats might become a musical symphony for children along the lines of Peter and the Wolf.
In the summer of 1980, at a country house called Sydmonton he’d bought in 1973, Lloyd Webber played his songs for his friends. They had gathered for what Lloyd Webber called “my little festival,” a weekend of music, games, food, and wine. Lloyd Webber shrewdly invited Eliot’s widow, Valerie. He’d need her blessing, of course, to pursue Cats. She thought his tunes were delightful and told him her husband would have enjoyed them as well. She brought with her some unpublished material, including a long letter Eliot had written suggesting a way in which the poems might be put together for a theatrical evening. She also had a scrap of verse about Grizabella the Glamour Cat that had been left out of Old Possum’s because Eliot thought it was too depressing for children.
“The letter contained basically a plot outline, including an event the cats attend once a year called the Jellicle Ball,” Lloyd Webber recalled. “There was a long poem about cats and dogs, and how they all get in a balloon and fly over the Russell Hotel.”
The poem, called “Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats,” did not appear in Old Possum’s, but Lloyd Webber set it to music (he can be heard singing it on the bonus tracks of his CD anthology, Now & Forever). Eventually, he “eliminated the dog bits,” and the song became “The Jellicle Ball.”
Now that he had his lyricist, albeit a dead one, Lloyd Webber needed a producer. Robert Stigwood, a ruddy-faced Australian entertainment mogul who favored rum and Coke for breakfast over orange juice, had produced Joseph, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. He was also Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s agent and manager, taking an astounding 25 percent of their earnings.4 But by 1980, his interest had shifted to the movies. He’d already produced two big hits, Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and was spending more time in Hollywood. Stigwood and Lloyd Webber, who was becoming as shrewd with the accounting books as he was at the piano, also clashed over financial matters. Lloyd Webber bristled at just how much money Stigwood had made off his talent. As a result, the two parted ways in 1979. By then Lloyd Webber had already set up his own production company, The Really Useful Group. But he was not yet a producer himself, and so he was looking for someone with producing experience to work on Cats.
His producer came in the form of a youthful, roly-poly would-be impresario named Cameron Mackintosh. Their first encounter was a disaster. Mackintosh produced the Society of West End Theater awards—snickeringly referred to as SWET and today known as the Laurence Olivier Awards—in 1978, the year Evita won for Best Musical.
“The ceremony was actually a shambles, the whole thing,” Lloyd Webber said. “And when Tim and I picked up our award, I said, ‘It’s a shame that Hal Prince isn’t around to direct this event.’ ”
Lloyd Webber had never heard of Cameron Mackintosh. He assumed he was some “sixty-five-year-old Scotsman” who’d been hanging around the fringes of show business for years. Mackintosh was furious at Lloyd Webber’s jab. He told friends he’d see to it that Lloyd Webber would never work again in the West End. It was an absurd threat, but the feud took hold. Theater people gossiped about it over lunches at the Ivy restaurant. Lloyd Webber decided to make peace. He invited Mackintosh to lunch at the Savile Club. “We met at twelve thirty,” Lloyd Webber said. “At six we were still having lunch.”
The two biggest show queens in the West End (Lloyd Webber honorary—he’s straight) had found each other.
• • •
They had similar backgrounds. Both men grew up immersed in music. Lloyd Webber’s father was the director of the London College of Music. William Lloyd Webber dreamed of becoming a famous classical composer, but never did. An accomplished musician, he had to make a living taking ac
ademic jobs, which left him frustrated and bitter. “If you ever write a song as good as ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ I’ll tell you,” Bill once said to Andrew. The approval never came.5
Mackintosh’s father, Ian, was a jazz trumpeter who never made it, either. To raise his three sons (Cameron was the eldest), he took a job in his father’s lumber business. But office work was not for him, and he could usually be found at the local pub drinking and playing his trumpet. “He liked to drink,” Barry Burnett, one of Cameron Mackintosh’s oldest friends, said of Ian. “But the boys loved him because he was fun.”
Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh both had Mame-like aunts who hooked them on musical theater. Lloyd Webber’s aunt Viola, a vivacious former actress, introduced her young nephew to the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Frederick Loewe. He saw the movie version of South Pacific twelve times. His first West End show was My Fair Lady. He was so enamored of musicals, he built a toy theater with which he spent hours re-creating The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and Gigi.
Mackintosh’s aunt Jean took him, when he was eight, to see Julian Slade’s popular British musical Salad Days, about a magic piano that makes anyone who hears it dance. He liked it so much he went back to see it a few days later. Slade was playing the piano in the orchestra and after the show, eight-year-old Cameron ran down to the pit and demanded to know how the magic piano worked. Slade gave the boy a backstage tour. At that moment Mackintosh determined to be in the theater.6 He went home and built his own toy theater in which he staged puppet shows with his brother Robert.
When they met for lunch at the Savile Club after the shambolic SWET awards, Lloyd Webber was far more established than Mackintosh. The composer was rich and, at least in England, famous. Mackintosh was a second-tier producer with several flops to his credit and only one genuine success, Side by Side by Sondheim, a revue of Stephen Sondheim songs. But Mackintosh was irrepressible and ambitious. Nothing set him back. He landed his first professional job in the theater at eighteen as a stagehand for Camelot at the Drury Lane. By the time he was twenty, he’d set up an office as a producer, even though he was still earning his money polishing the brass rails of the Drury Lane after performances. Barry Burnett, a budding agent who represented a number of up-and-coming West End talents, got a call from a “Mr. Cameron Mackintosh” one day. He said he was producing a musical version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. And wanted to audition one of Burnett’s clients.
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