As for the New York Times, Frank Rich waffled, though thoughtfully. He recognized that whatever the critics might say about the show “it is likely to lurk around Broadway for a long time.” But not because it was brilliant or emotionally powerful or “has an idea in its head.” Lloyd Webber’s songs were “sweet,” but the show was full of banalities and long, cat-nap inducing stretches of boredom. Its trump card, however, was its theatricality. “It’s a musical that transports the audience into a complete fantasy world that could only exist in the theater and yet, these days, only rarely does. Whatever the other failings . . . of Cats, it believes in purely theatrical magic, and on that faith it unquestionably delivers.”
The next morning, Nancy Coyne, who did the advertising for the show, walked into Bernie Jacobs’s office to sort through the reviews and pick out the best lines for quote ads. But Jacobs was unhappy with the notices, especially Rich’s giveth-on-the-one-hand-and-taketh-away-on-the-other assessment.
“I don’t want to use any quotes,” he told Coyne. “Just give me a copy line.”
As it happened, Coyne had with her the script for a radio spot. It read, “When you walk into the Winter Garden Theatre, you will be transformed. From now on and forever, you will remember Cats.”
Coyne had highlighted, in yellow, the phrase “from now on and forever.” The phrase had been in her mind ever since she was a kid. It was the title of a 1934 Shirley Temple movie, Now and Forever.
When Jacobs read the line he said, “That’s it.”
Coyne dropped the “on” and Now and Forever became the slogan for Cats. For years, Jacobs refused to quote any critics in advertisements. He also wanted to keep the look of the production a secret. And so the ads for Cats were always black with a pair of yellow eyes and the words “Now and Forever.”
Jacobs also wanted a television commercial. He would spend a lot of money to swamp the mixed reviews. But, as with the print ads, he did not want the TV commercial to give anything away. So Coyne simply animated the yellow eyes with a dancer in each. “Cats,” an announcer said. “Now and Forever.”
The mixed reviews did nothing to impede Cats. Within weeks, the $6.2 million advance hit $10 million. It would eventually reach $20 million. The show was doing the kind of business a successful movie does.
Everybody wanted tickets, many long before the show played its first preview. One morning in the summer of 1982, while Cats was still in rehearsal, producer Albert Poland walked into Jacobs’s office to discuss a business matter. Jacobs was yelling into the phone. He had three pieces of toilet paper stuck to his face because he’d cut himself shaving.
“Mr. de Rothschild, I can’t hear you!” he said. “Mr. de Rothschild, I’m in the business of selling tickets. I can’t hear you. Mr. de Rothschild, I’m hanging up now.”
“Was that the Baron de Rothschild?” Poland asked.
“Yes.”
“What? He wants a free pair of tickets to Cats?”
“A free pair?” Jacobs snapped. “He wants the whole theater! He’s giving a benefit and thinks I should donate all the tickets. Well,” Jacobs grumbled, “what is he anyway? Just a Jew with a ‘de’ in front of his name.”
• • •
The business matter Poland came to discuss that morning was the budget for an Off-Broadway musical the Shuberts were going to produce with David Geffen and Cameron Mackintosh at the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village. It was called Little Shop of Horrors. Poland was the general manager.
Based on Roger Corman’s 1960 horror movie about a man-eating plant, the musical debuted in May 1982 at the tiny WPA Theatre. Poland first heard of it when he received a phone call from Kyle Renick, who ran the WPA. “I have this show down here, and twenty-five producers are chasing it and I would like you to come and see it and be our general manager if we move it to a larger theater,” he told Poland.
Poland liked the show—it was funny and campy with a touch of menace—and he thought it would work commercially in an Off-Broadway theater. He rang up his friend Cameron Mackintosh, who was in town laying the groundwork that spring for Cats, to see if he’d like to invest. “OK,” said Mackintosh, “but call Bernie.”
Poland arranged for Jacobs and his wife to see the show that night. The next morning Jacobs delivered his verdict: “Well, it wasn’t my cup of tea, and Betty didn’t much care for it.”
Poland could feel the show slipping away.
“The British would like it because it has a lot of whimsy, and the British like whimsy,” Jacobs continued. “But if you want us to come along, we might consider it.”
Poland called the agent who represented one of the creators and told her the Shuberts were ambivalent. She said David Geffen was coming to see the show that night. If he liked it, he might sway Jacobs. But Geffen never showed up. “Do you think Bernie said something negative?” she asked Poland. “No,” he said, adding with a laugh, “he probably met someone on the way!” (Which, as Poland would later discover, was the case.)
A few days later Poland received a call from Jacobs. “Albert, I have David Geffen on the line with us,” he said. “How much do you think Little Shop of Horrors will cost?”
Poland hadn’t done a budget but blurted out, “Three hundred and fifty thousand.”
“We’ll take it,” Jacobs said. “David, will you come in with us?”
“Whatever you say, Bernie,” Geffen replied.
“We have to find room for Cameron,” Poland said. “I called him first.”
“All right, we’ll give him ten percent,” said Jacobs.
The deal was done. Poland could not figure out why Jacobs changed his mind about Little Shop of Horrors. He found out a few days later. Broadway producer Alex Cohen went to see the show and told Jacobs he didn’t like it.
“That’s when I knew it would be a hit,” Jacobs told Poland.
Little Shop was indeed a hit. By the fall of 1982, the show was turning a weekly profit of $4,000 to $6,000 in a theater with just three hundred and fifty seats. No show in Off-Broadway history had ever made such money. But the Shuberts weren’t satisfied with the take. They wanted to raise ticket prices from seven dollars to ten so they could squeeze some more money out of what Schoenfeld referred to as “our little slot machine.”
Poland resisted. He had spent his career Off Broadway. He knew the terrain better than the Shuberts. The audience would balk at a ten-dollar ticket and the show would suffer. “You will destroy Off Broadway with your greed,” Poland protested. What, he wanted to know, was wrong with a profit of four to six thousand dollars a week?
Jacobs pulled out the accountant’s statement for the first week of performances for Cats at the Winter Garden. The operating profit that week was $186,000.
“I almost fainted,” Poland recalled.
Today, adjusted for inflation, that would be a weekly profit of $500,000. No show, in the history of Broadway, in the history of live theater, had ever made that much money. And it had the highest ticket price—forty-five dollars—ever for a Broadway musical. But that didn’t stop people from wanting to see it. The Shuberts had a winner in Little Shop, and Jacobs believed that if people wanted to see it they would pay any price, as they did with Cats.
The price went up. Little Shop ran five years and became the highest-grossing musical in Off-Broadway history.
• • •
The impact of Cats on Broadway was enormous.
The Shuberts were already getting rich from the rent from such shows as A Chorus Line and 42nd Street and their participation in Dreamgirls. But with Cats, they were getting money from all directions—their 40 percent stake, the rent from the Winter Garden, their slice of the merchandising. The profits would only swell. There would be North American tours, all of which the Shuberts would control. The show would make the Shuberts richer than anything even Sam, Lee, or J. J. Shubert could have imagined.
Since Cats was a hit with family audiences, the Shuberts had even more incentive to pressure city officials to clean up
Times Square.
Cats would make Lloyd Webber the most famous Broadway composer since Irving Berlin. He could do whatever show he wanted because his name above the title meant a line at the box office. For Cameron Mackintosh, Cats ended a small-time hit-or-miss career and put him on the path to becoming the most successful producer in theatrical history. Together, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh developed a new way of producing musicals, one that would introduce musical theater to the world. The Shuberts controlled Cats in North America, but Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh had the rights for every other market. At the time, producers of popular Broadway shows licensed those shows to local producers in other countries, believing that a local producer knew his audience better than a Broadway producer ever would. But there wasn’t much demand for Broadway musicals outside of America, England, and Japan (the Japanese loved Fiddler on the Roof and A Chorus Line). The idea of a global hit did not exist. Cats would change that. And Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh knew it. They saw how popular the show was in New York and London with tourists who didn’t speak English. Cats could probably play anywhere in the world, but to do so effectively it would have to be the same production that worked so well on Broadway. Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh would see to that.
“I remember having lunch with Cameron at that Movenpick restaurant around the corner from the Winter Garden Theatre on a very hot day,” Lloyd Webber recalled. “And I told Cameron that we really should take a leaf out of what Robert Stigwood had told me. He said the key to a successful show was to replicate it quickly, and exactly, in other places. Cameron understood what Stigwood was on about, and he brilliantly got the bit between the teeth.”
In short order there would be productions of Cats in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America—each one a duplicate of the one at the Winter Garden.
The era of the global Broadway spectacle had arrived.
• • •
And yet down at the Orpheum Theatre on the Lower East Side, Little Shop of Horrors was planting the seeds of a phenomenon that, arguably, would alter Broadway—and New York City—even more profoundly than Cats, the Shuberts, or Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh.
Little Shop was written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. The company manager was Peter Schneider. In 1985 Schneider moved to Hollywood with the unenviable job of revitalizing Walt Disney Studio’s moribund animation department. He got in touch with Ashman to see if he’d be interested in tackling some of the projects that were, quite literally, on Disney’s drawing board.
One was The Little Mermaid.
The other was Beauty and the Beast.
* * *
I. Jacobs had seen the play in London the previous year with his wife and a young producer they’d both grown fond of named Cameron Mackintosh. Betty and Mackintosh loved the play, but Jacobs nodded off during the second act. “It’s good he had a sleep in the middle,” Betty confided to Mackintosh. “I’m not sure he would have taken it if he’d sat through the whole thing.”
II. Decades later, after Mackintosh had become the most successful producer in theater history, he bought several West End theaters, including the Prince of Wales. There was office space above the theater, which he let to Burnett. After six months, Burnett began to wonder why he never received a bill for the rent. He asked Mackintosh’s secretary what he owed. She told him, “Cameron said, ‘No rent for Barry for a year.’ ”
III. When it comes to “Memory,” memories are hazy. Lloyd Webber says his friend Don Black never wrote any lyrics. Black differs: “I remember vividly having lunch with Trevor and Andrew at the Capital Hotel in Basil Street when I was asked to have a go at writing the lyrics to the now-familiar melody. I have been asked over the years to try and locate them and I’ve had a look through some old files to no avail. As this subject keeps coming up I am determined to dig a bit deeper and find them. I know ‘Memory’ did quite well, but can you imagine the impact it would have had if they had the sense to use my words!”
IV. Elice, after several years as a Broadway advertising executive, would go on to write the musicals Jersey Boys and The Addams Family.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mesmerizing Temptation
Michael Bennett turned forty on April 9, 1983. Marvin Krauss, the wily general manager who tried to buy Henry Krieger’s share of Dreamgirls during its Boston tryout, threw a party for Bennett at 890 Broadway. Everyone was asked to wear red, Bennett’s favorite color. The vast rehearsal spaces of 890 were turned into a mini Coney Island, with a boardwalk, balloons, popcorn machines, an ice-cream parlor, and a hot dog stand. There were less family-friendly stands as well, some providing booze and another supplying “drugs of one’s choice.”1
Krauss, along with eight of Bennett’s friends, paid for the party. Each also ponied up $4,000 for a red Porsche for Bennett, which was delivered to 890 wrapped in a giant red bow.
“As though Michael, who was making $90,000 a week, needed a Porsche from his friends,” said John Breglio. “He didn’t even drive. But Marvin wanted to show his love. I remember Michael called me up after the party and said, ‘They bought me a sports car! I have no interest in it, but I’ll act like I like it.’ He never used it. He was scared of it.”
Bernie and Betty Jacobs were invited. When Jacobs walked into 890, he realized he was a guest, not one of the hosts. Jacobs thought he knew everything that was going on in and around Bennett’s life, but others close to Bennett—rivals for the director’s affection and loyalty, in Jacobs’s view—had produced this over-the-top birthday bash. He was furious, and the object of his wrath was Krauss. “Bernie hated Marvin’s guts after that party,” said Robin Wagner.
“If Bernie had thought of it, he would have thrown the party,” said Breglio. “But it was too late. Marvin did it. But you didn’t do things like that that would be perceived by Bernie as interfering with his direct link to Michael. He was the father, so who are you to give Michael a birthday party? But what Bernie didn’t realize was that Michael was never going to turn on him. He was devoted to Bernie because he knew that Bernie was the power he needed to close the circle. Michael was the most powerful director on Broadway. He had the money, the talent, the actors. The only thing he didn’t have was the theater. And Bernie could give him that. Whatever theater Michael wanted, Bernie gave him.”
Soon after the party, Jacobs struck out at Krauss. The general manager was about to take over the national tour of Dreamgirls, a lucrative gig. Jacobs took the tour away from him. It was a swift and brutal way of cutting Krauss out of Bennett’s affairs. After one bruising meeting with Jacobs, Krauss went to a bar and got so drunk he called his wife to come get him. He thought his career was over.
“Ninety percent of the time Bernie exercised his power with wisdom,” said producer Robert Fox, a friend of Jacobs. “Ten percent of the time he could get ridiculously cranky—and that usually had something to do with Michael.”
Krauss pleaded with Phil Smith and producer Manny Azenberg to intercede on his behalf. Eventually, they made Jacobs see he was overreacting. Or, as Azenberg put it, “Bernie, are you nuts?” Jacobs relented, but he never fully trusted Krauss again.I
• • •
As Jacobs seethed in a corner of 890 Broadway during Bennett’s party, another drama was unfolding in the men’s room. Tommy Tune and Bennett had begun to patch up their relationship after the battle between Nine and Dreamgirls. They’d run into each other at a party for Broadway people on a cruise around Manhattan. Bennett had said to Tune, “Darling, it’s a truce.” So Tune accepted the invitation to the birthday party. He arrived from rehearsals for his next show, My One and Only, which featured songs by George and Ira Gershwin. Tune was starring in the show opposite Twiggy.
But My One and Only was in serious trouble.
The Boston tryout had been a disaster. The original director, Peter Sellars, who’d made his name directing avant-garde operas, wanted the show to be fluffy, silly fun—but also satirical and political. This musical comedy would deal with the
colonization of the Third World, the rise of corporate culture, and the oppression of women.2
But Guys and Dolls does not meet Mother Courage easily, and a few days before previews began in Boston, an executive from Paramount Pictures, the lead producer, fired Sellars and his avant-garde collaborators. The show went on, but its incoherent plot baffled audiences. Tune took to giving curtain speeches. “Don’t worry. The parts that don’t make any sense to you don’t make any sense to us, either. That’s why we’re in Boston.” Paramount asked Tune to take over the direction and choreography—while continuing to star in the show. Tune sent out an all-points bulletin to his friends in the theater. Peter Stone, who wrote the musicals 1776 and Woman of the Year and had a reputation for fast rewrites, went to Boston. So, too, did Mike Nichols. Within weeks they performed major surgery on the show that “saved us from putting people to sleep,” Tune told the New York Times.3
But the press, in the form of Bennett’s friend Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe, was out to get My One and Only. Kelly asked if he could write an article for the Globe on the out-of-town tryout. The producers gave him fly-on-the-wall access. He was there for the disastrous early previews, when audiences were leaving in droves, the firing of Sellars, and the arrival of Stone and Nichols. But the article never appeared in the Globe. Kelly sold it to New York magazine without telling anyone. His hatchet piece ran under the headline “Falling on Its Funny Face,” with the helpful subhead, “My One and Only may well become a classic theater disaster.”4
The Tony battle between Nine and Dreamgirls still irked Bennett’s friends, including Kelly.
“We should have realized he wanted to murder us because of Nine,” said Francine LeFrak, coproducer of both Nine and My One and Only.
My One and Only was back in rehearsals in New York at the time of Bennett’s fortieth birthday party and was still undergoing extensive retooling. Bennett, of course, had heard the gossip. When Tune entered 890 Broadway with a few friends from the show, Bennett took them by the hand and pulled them into the men’s room. He closed the door and said, “All right now, darlings, here’s what’s happening. I’m coming in to help you. I’m going to save your show.”
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