Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  “Send over a script,” Burnett said.

  An hour later a pudgy kid arrived at the office with the script.

  “Thank you very much,” Burnett said. “Please tell Mr. Mackintosh I will be in touch when I’ve read it.”

  “I am Mr. Mackintosh,” the pudgy kid said.

  Mackintosh and Burnett spent the next five hours talking about musical theater, cementing an enduring friendship. Burnett liked Mackintosh so much, he offered him a desk and a phone in his office for five pounds a week. Mackintosh, who was just scraping by, accepted. He often took Burnett to lunch, but he never managed to come up with the rent. Burnett was surprised one morning when a middle-aged lady showed up at the office claiming to be “Mr. Mackintosh’s new secretary.” Where had Mackintosh gotten the money for a secretary? Mackintosh came bounding through the door. He smiled at the middle-aged lady and said, “Hi, mum!”II

  Mackintosh’s first West End production was a revival of Anything Goes in 1969. He threw the opening party at the Unicorn pub near the theater. Everybody got food poisoning. The show closed a few days later, losing $45,000. Mackintosh needed to earn money, so he took a job as a publicist for a touring production of Hair. He returned to the West End with Trelawny, a musical version of Arthur Wing Pinero’s play Trelawny of the Wells. It received good reviews, but did little business. His next show—The Card—was also well received, but didn’t catch on. Though he was a producer without a hit, his backers remained loyal. They admired his ambition, and laughed at his bitchy sense of humor. Theater owners liked him, too. He became friendly with Toby Rowland and his assistant, Jack Barum. Rowland ran the Stoll Moss Theatres Group, essentially the Shuberts of the West End. Mackintosh learned firsthand their “brilliant” negotiating technique.

  “When they were courting you for a show—or if you were courting them for a theater—they would invite you to the office around eleven thirty,” he recalled. “Toby would be there on his own and say, ‘How lovely to see you!’ And about a quarter to twelve Jack came in—you could set your watch by it. There would be hugging and gossip, and then Toby would say, ‘Oh, Jack, would you like a whiskey? Of course, Cameron, you’ll join us.’ There would be a little whiskey for Toby, a bigger one for Jack and a tumbler full for you. ‘Cheers!’ they’d say. ‘How great to see you! Your show sounds marvelous!’ By the time you finished your first drink, they were saying your show was one of the best shows ever and they would move heaven and earth to have it in one of their theaters. And then you’d get down to the nitty gritty of the terms, by which time you’d be on your third whiskey. When it came to the stuff that really mattered, you had no idea what you’d agreed to. You got whatever theater they wanted you to have, and on their terms. But you left euphoric because they loved your show and you had a theater. They were brilliant.”7

  It was through Toby Rowland that Cameron Mackintosh first met Bernie Jacobs. In 1975, Mackintosh had saved up enough money to buy a cheap ticket to New York, his first trip to America. Rowland told him he must meet the head of the Shuberts, and made a call to Jacobs by way of an introduction. Mackintosh presented himself at the Shubert executive offices and was ushered into Jacobs’s office, where he also met Schoenfeld and Phil Smith.

  “They couldn’t have been nicer,” he recalled. “They set me up with tickets to all the shows and they took me for lunch at Sardi’s. And remember—there was nothing there for them but the possible promise of my having a career one day.” In subsequent visits to New York, Bernie and Betty Jacobs put Mackintosh up in their guest room in their Upper East Side town house so he could save money on hotel rooms. “I used to call it my New York pad,” Mackintosh said.

  A little over a year after meeting the Shuberts, Mackintosh had his first hit with Side by Side, despite a warning from another New York friend, producer Arthur Cantor, that “Sondheim closes in previews!” Side by Side ran 781 performances in the West End. On an investment of six thousand pounds it returned a hundred thousand.8 Emboldened by the success of the revue format, Mackintosh produced another one in 1977 called After Shave, with an all-female cast. “It was an almost-lesbian revue,” he recalled. “Legendary that one was. Even I didn’t want to go to the first night. Even I knew it was going to be a turkey.”

  After Shave would be the last of the Mackintosh flops for a long time to come. Midway through their six-hour lunch at the Savile, after a second bottle of good red wine, Andrew Lloyd Webber said, “Cameron, I have this daft idea of doing a musical based on a book of poems about cats.”

  Three hours later, they got up from the table and shook hands. Their deal for Cats was done.

  • • •

  Casting about for a director, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh knew they wanted someone of stature—someone whose name would assure Valerie Eliot that her husband’s poems would be in good hands. The director of the moment was Trevor Nunn, of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He’d never directed a musical before, but, as he’d demonstrated with Nicholas Nickleby, he knew how to move a large group of people around onstage. He’d also had another success at the RSC—a musical version of Comedy of Errors, which had dances by Gillian Lynne. Mackintosh knew Lynne from a production of My Fair Lady they’d done a few years earlier. He brought her on board, and she, in turn, convinced Nunn to direct Cats. John Napier, Nunn’s collaborator on Nicholas Nickleby, signed up as set designer.

  As they began planning their production, the creators of Cats realized they would need a lot of dancing as the story (such as it was) revolved around the Jellicle Ball. The show would be something new for the West End—a dance musical. “Which is another reason people thought we were stark-raving mad,” Lloyd Webber said. “At the time, we didn’t do dance musicals. We didn’t have many choreographers in Britain.”

  Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh needed to raise five hundred thousand pounds. They had few takers. David Dein, a successful garment manufacturer who had backed all of Mackintosh’s shows, said, “Cameron, I love you. But I’m not investing in this one. It will never work. England is a nation of dog lovers.”

  Mackintosh turned to other friends, including Burnett, who kicked in anywhere from five hundred to seven hundred and fifty pounds. But it was still a struggle. Eventually, Lloyd Webber came through with the money by mortgaging Sydmonton.

  • • •

  As Cats was coming together in rehearsals—though nobody in the cast really knew what it was about—Nunn told Lloyd Webber the show was missing an eleven o’clock number, the big tune that sends the audience out with the song ringing in their ears. He thought Grizabella should sing it. He wanted it to evoke memories of her “days in the sun,” as Eliot had put it. As it so happened, Lloyd Webber had a song in his trunk of discarded tunes, a trunk that every composer has and riffles through in a pinch. Lloyd Webber once toyed with the idea of writing an opera about the rivalry between Puccini and Leoncavallo, who were both working on operas based on Henri Murger’s novel Scènes de la vie de bohème. (Guess who won.) Lloyd Webber’s opera never got anywhere, but he did manage to write a lush and haunting Puccini-esque tune, which he played for Nunn. It was exactly what Nunn was looking for. Lloyd Webber, however, was concerned. It sounded so much like Puccini that, he feared, it might be from a Puccini opera. He played it for his father, a Puccini expert, and asked, “Does this sound like anything?”

  “It sounds like $10 million,” his father replied, adding, “you’ve done a very clever pastiche, but it’s not by Puccini.”9

  Soon after, Lloyd Webber met his friend Gary Moore, the singer and guitarist, for a drink in the West End. Moore had been the lead guitarist on Lloyd Webber’s classical and rock fusion album, Variations. Lloyd Webber told Moore about what he thought of as his Cats theme. “Fuck, I’d like to record that,” Moore said. The recording wound up in the hands of a BBC radio host who played it one night on a popular music program.

  Elaine Paige, who had triumphed in the West End as the star of Evita, was pulling up in front of her house in the suburbs when Mo
ore’s recording came on the radio.

  “The tune gripped me somehow,” she said, “and I remember jumping out of the car and running to the front door and fumbling through my bag for my keys because I wanted to try to tape-record it. I looked down and saw this black, rather feeble, pathetic looking cat at my feet. It rubbed up and down my ankles, and it followed me into the house as I ran to turn on the radio and the tape recorder. I gave the cat a saucer of milk and I went to bed with my Sony Walkman listening to Andrew’s new tune over and over again. I vowed I’d ring Andrew up the next morning and tell him how touched I was by it.”

  The next morning her phone rang. It was Andrew. Judi Dench, who was playing Grizabella, had torn her Achilles tendon and was in the hospital. Previews were to start in less than a week. Dench would be off her feet for a month or more.

  “We’re in trouble,” Lloyd Webber said. “Would you come down to the theater and have a chat with me and Trevor and Gilly about taking over the role of Grizabella?”

  “What does it involve?” Paige asked. “I don’t know anything about the show because you’ve kept it all under wraps.”

  “Well, it’s not Evita,” Lloyd Webber said. “You only have one song, but it’s a great song.”

  “It wouldn’t be the song I heard on the radio last night by any chance, would it?”

  “That’s it!”

  Paige looked around the kitchen. Where is that damned cat? she thought. What was going on? This was spooky beyond belief.

  • • •

  As Paige entered the New London Theatre, she saw slender performers in beautifully painted body suits leaping about a stage strewn with rubble—giant cans of Heinz baked beans, the back end of an oversize junked car, an enormous tire. It was only then that she realized Cats was indeed about cats, that the actors were playing cats. “It was a well-kept secret until opening night. The idea of people cavorting around as cats seemed ridiculous to me, but the set was so unusual and clever,” she recalled.

  Nunn explained the show and Grizabella to her. Grizabella, the faded glamour cat, was the linchpin of the story. She’d fallen on hard times, but she would be chosen as the cat to go to the Heaviside Layer, the cat who would be redeemed. Andrew played her the Cats theme, and Nunn handed her a rough lyric he’d cobbled together from an Eliot poem called “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” The working title of the song was “Memory.”

  Paige showed the song to her lover, Tim Rice. He liked it and wanted to “have a go,” as the British say, at the lyric. Lloyd Webber agreed, and Rice dashed off some verses. But he wasn’t the only writer working on the song. Nunn asked Don Black, whose songs included “Born Free” and “Thunderball,” to come up with something as well. When previews began, Paige sang Trevor Nunn’s lyric at the matinee, Tim Rice’s lyric in the evening, and Don Black’s lyric the next day. “And sometimes they’d give me different bits of different people’s lyrics,” she said. “It was a nightmare. I didn’t know if I was on foot or horseback.”

  In the end, Nunn decided to go with his lyric. They don’t call him “Clever Trevor” for nothing. He realized Lloyd Webber’s tune was beautiful and unforgettable, and if he wrote the lyrics to it, he would own one half of what, if the show worked, might become a standard. Rice was furious. He threatened legal action. Black didn’t care. “It was no big deal,” he said. “We’re just lyric writers for hire.”III

  As this drama unfolded backstage, Bernie and Betty Jacobs took their seats at a preview of Cats. On the plane to London, Jacobs read Eliot’s book and couldn’t figure out how anyone could make a musical out of it. It was a children’s book, so Jacobs brought his grandson Jared to the show. Afterward, in their suite at the Berkeley Hotel, Bernie and Betty discussed the show. It certainly was theatrical, but it didn’t make much sense. There was no plot, just something to do with a bunch of cats in a junkyard getting ready for something called the Jellicle Ball. A haunted, mangy cat sang a pretty song and then went up to heaven on a tire. “We didn’t know what to make of it,” Betty Jacobs said. But their grandson liked it—so much so that he wanted to go back the next night. There weren’t any tickets available—Cats was catching on and the final previews were sold out—so Jared, who was six, sat on the steps of the New London and watched it again. He was enchanted. Jacobs made his decision. “If the young ones like it, there must be something to it,” he told Betty.

  • • •

  The first public performance of Cats was, as Lloyd Webber recalled, rocky. The first act played well, the second not so well. The next night, the first act died, but the second took off. The third night, a Friday, both acts worked. Relieved, Lloyd Webber and his wife thought they’d raise a glass at Annabel’s, a private nightclub in Berkeley Square. When they arrived, the doorman asked Lloyd Webber if he could get tickets to Cats.

  “That’s when we knew it was a hit,” Lloyd Webber said.

  Cats opened at the New London on May 11, 1981. A few minutes before Paige sang “Memory,” a note arrived at the stage door. It was a bomb scare. The stage doorman, knowing the show would be ruined without “Memory,” delayed making an announcement. When the song was over, Brian Blessed, as Old Deuteronomy, stepped to the front of the stage and said, in his booming, theatrical voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please move out of the theater in an orderly fashion.” The audience, puzzled, began to laugh. “No, I’m quite serious. We have been asked to leave the theater.”

  The first-night crowd stood in front of the theater, while the actors lingered in the alleyway. Soon, the first-nighters were mingling with the actors. They wanted to see and touch the cat costumes.

  “They were excited,” Paige recalled. “I was terrified. There were police and dogs everywhere. But the audience didn’t seem to care. They wanted to talk about our makeup. There was absolute excitement in the air. I knew then we were a hit. My only regret is that I didn’t put any money in the show. It wasn’t fully financed on opening night, and Cameron was asking us if we’d like to put a few pennies in. But Tim had said to me, ‘Never invest in your own stuff.’ So I told Cameron, ‘I don’t think so.’ What an idiot!”

  The reviews were mixed, their tone best caught in the Observer: “Cats isn’t perfect. Don’t miss it.” The show opened with a small advance sale, but in a few weeks Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh realized they had more than a hit on their hands. They had a phenomenon. Articles about Cats began appearing in papers all over the world. Producers from other countries wanted it for their theaters. David Merrick offered them his smash 42nd Street for London if they would give him Cats for New York.

  The first place to go was, of course, Broadway—which, as Lloyd Webber knew from the success of Evita, was where the real money was made. That summer, Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber headed to New York to begin negotiations. They treated themselves to state rooms on the Queen Elizabeth 2. Lloyd Webber brought his wife and young daughter, Imogen.

  “It was the first time I was allowed to stay up for dinner,” Imogen recalled.

  “Well, that was because the nanny went off with a member of the crew, which was a problem,” her father said.

  In New York, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh started making the rounds of theater owners and producers. First they met Jimmy Nederlander in his ramshackle offices above the Palace Theatre. Lena Horne: “The Lady and Her Music” was the hottest show in town. Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh asked if they could have tickets. Jimmy jumped up and said to his staff, “These boys want tickets to Lena Horne! What have we got to do with Lena Horne?” Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh were baffled. The show was at the Nederlander Theatre, but Jimmy Nederlander didn’t seem to know that.

  Their next meeting was with Schoenfeld and Jacobs over lunch at Sardi’s. Halfway through the meal, producer Manny Azenberg, a Shubert ally, walked over to the table and said, “See that brown roll? It was white before Bernie looked at it.”

  After lunch, Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber headed to a bar. They needed a drink. “These are the people who run Broadwa
y?” they said to each other. “They’re all mad.”

  In the end, they decided to go with the Shuberts. Mackintosh had grown close to Bernie and Betty, and neither he nor Lloyd Webber had any experience producing a show in New York. They needed Shubert resources and expertise.

  Originally, they wanted to put Cats in an unconventional space. They traipsed around New York, examining Roseland, a concert hall, and the ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel, which was owned by the Moonies. They even scurried around backstage at the decrepit New Amsterdam Theatre with flashlights as a pornographic movie was being shown on a giant screen.

  The Shuberts, of course, wanted the show for one of their theaters, but they indulged Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh’s hunt for an unorthodox space. When the New Amsterdam Theatre entered the picture, Jacobs thought the Shuberts should buy it. He decided to inspect the property. As he and Phil Smith walked along Forty-Second Street from Eighth Avenue to Seventh, prostitutes and drug dealers propositioned them every step of the way. By the time they reached the theater, Jacobs had made up his mind. A show with family appeal could never be produced on this block.

  • • •

  With some prodding from Jacobs, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh decided the best theater for Cats would be the Winter Garden, which had an unusual configuration since it had once been the American Horse Exchange. It was also in better shape than Jimmy Nederlander’s houses. “Frankly, the Shubert theaters were the only ones that had ever seen a paintbrush,” said Mackintosh. “The other theaters were scummy dumps. Awful. I just didn’t want to put a show of mine into a hideous environment.”