Tune recalled, “We didn’t ask him. And he was as high as a skunk. But most of us wouldn’t be where we were in show business without him, and he’s telling us, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll save you. I’ll pull this off for you.’ ”
The next morning, Bennett showed up at the St. James Theatre with his own team to fix My One and Only. But his approach, his energy, his whole demeanor were off. He seemed bent on taking a show aiming to be effervescent and turning it into something dark and brutal. He was giving orders like a general, demanding that Paramount come up with another $300,000 for new sets, including a giant suitcase on which he wanted Twiggy to make her entrance. “We were getting bills for money we didn’t have,” said LeFrak.
Bennett was working around the clock, keeping the cast in the theater until 2:00 a.m. drilling them in new and vulgar dance routines. He was running on booze and drugs. He stood on the stage, a vodka bottle in one hand, a bowl of cocaine in the other. Tune was so busy working on his performance—and helping Twiggy with hers (they were also having a fling)—that he didn’t realize what Bennett was doing to My One and Only.
It took Mike Nichols to see that.
Nichols took Tune aside and said Bennett “is not doing good work. He may not be doing it consciously, but subconsciously he is ruining your show.”
Bennett had to go—but nobody wanted to tell him. “I couldn’t do it,” said Tune. “And Nichols said, ‘I can’t do it.’ ” In the end, it fell to Don Sherkow, a junior Paramount executive, to fire Broadway’s number one director. He walked up to Bennett after a rehearsal one day and told him he was no longer wanted. Bennett put on his baseball cap and left the theater. He called Tune later and said, “Don’t worry about me. But please write to my team and thank them for their work.”
Tune did. And then he threw out everything they had done.
In the end, Tune, Nichols, and Stone managed to save My One and Only. It opened to enthusiastic reviews—“the only new or old musical that sends us home on air,” wrote Frank Rich—and managed a decent run of nearly two years at the St. James. Tune won the Tony for his performance and his choreography. But the Shuberts, the producers of Cats, had nothing to fear that year from My One and Only.
Cats won seven Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Score, Best Direction, and Best Featured Actress—Betty Buckley. It even won Best Book, which was credited to T. S. Eliot, who had been dead for eighteen years. Peter Stone, whose fast, agile rewrite of My One and Only was up against Eliot’s old poems, was pretty sure he was going to win that night. When he heard “And the winner is . . .” he got up out of his seat, only to sink back into it when the announcer said, “T. S. Eliot.”
“In retrospect I should have realized what was going to happen,” he said. “I saw Eliot’s widow, Valerie, at the theater that night. The Shuberts would never have flown her over if they didn’t think they were going to win.”
• • •
Humiliated by his dismissal from My One and Only, Bennett turned his attention to staging the 3,389th performance of A Chorus Line at the Shubert Theatre on September 29, 1983. On that date, A Chorus Line would overtake Grease as the longest-running show in Broadway history. Bennett asked everyone who had ever been in the show, from the original cast, to Broadway replacements, to performers who toured America and the world, to take part in the performance. With just three days of rehearsal, he integrated over three hundred dancers into the production. Among the highlights: seven actresses who had played Cassie, including Donna McKechnie, performing “The Music and the Mirror”; Chikae Ishikawa, of the Japanese company, singing “Nothing” in Japanese; and an astonishing finale during which the dancers, clad in the by-now familiar gold top hats and tuxedos, filled the stage and the aisles of the orchestra and balcony and performed “One.”
“The theater seemed to shake,” Frank Rich wrote of the final number in the Times the next day. “The cast and the audience had become one, united in the at-least-momentary conviction that A Chorus Line was the best thing that had happened to any of us.”
Bennett next turned his attention to a new show that, he believed, would push the Broadway musical into territory more controversial than anything he’d done with Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince. It was a musical called Scandal, and it was about something never far from Bennett’s mind—sex. The script was by Treva Silverman, who had been a story editor on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Silverman and Bennett shared an intense curiosity about sex, Silverman admitting to Bennett (whom she met through their mutual friend, lyricist Ed Kleban) that, whenever she was in Europe, she would indulge in freewheeling sexual escapades. Bennett did the same in San Francisco, where he was having a fling with a clothing salesman. They frequented Golden Gate Park where they would have anonymous sex all night long.5
Scandal told the story of a woman who discovers her husband has been cheating on her. She then indulges in a series of sexual fantasies, which Bennett would choreograph. The score was by Jimmy Webb, who’d been hanging around 890 Broadway working on another Bennett project, The Children’s Crusade, based on the (mostly) mythical story of a group of children in thirteenth-century France who travel to the Holy Land and try to stop wars by spreading their faith. John Heilpern, a critic for the Times of London, who became close to Bennett after he raved about Dreamgirls, was writing the script. Bennett wanted to stage the show at Madison Square Garden with a chorus of a hundred teenage boys—which led some around 890 to dub the show “Chicken Hawk Casserole.”
Webb put aside The Children’s Crusade and went to work with Silverman on Scandal. While they came up with songs such as “She’s a Dyke,” Bennett and Bob Avian choreographed a ménage à trois, blow jobs, and orgy ballets.6
Scandal began workshops in the spring of 1984 with a cast that included Swoosie Kurtz, Treat Williams, and Victor Garber. Bennett told the Times, “It’s about sex. It’s not Oh, Calcutta! It is about a marriage that is a scandal and about the divorce and about the sex.”7 He was cagey about the timetable, saying the workshop could take anywhere from six months to a year. But, he added, “I did start it, and someday it ends up on the stage.”
But on what stage? It was true, as Breglio pointed out, Bennett could have any Shubert theater he wanted. Bernie Jacobs would see to that. But why not own a Broadway theater himself? As it happened, Jimmy Nederlander, feeling overextended with his theater empire, was looking for partners. One of his theaters was the Mark Hellinger, an art deco masterpiece, which he bought in 1970. Many theater people believed it was the best musical house on Broadway. It was Bennett’s favorite theater, partly because of its wide stage but also because Seesaw, his calling-card musical, had played there at the end of its run.
In the fall of 1984, Bennett began negotiating with Nederlander for a 50 percent stake in the Hellinger. It would, Breglio told Bennett, cost him nothing. He would pay for his half of the theater from the proceeds of the shows he would stage there. For Nederlander, it meant filling a theater that often stood empty—and filling it with shows by Michael Bennett, the creator of A Chorus Line and Dreamgirls.
Bennett started making plans for the Hellinger. He would paint the interior red. He designed uniforms for the ushers. They would be red, too. Eventually, Bennett planned to buy out Nederlander. And with the last piece in place—a Broadway theater—his empire would be complete. He wouldn’t need anyone anymore. He wouldn’t need the Shuberts. He wouldn’t need Bernie Jacobs.
Bennett tried to keep the negotiations secret from Jacobs, but the Broadway gossip vine began to hum. He had to tell Jacobs before he heard it on the street. He tracked Jacobs down in Sicily, where he was vacationing with his family, and told him over the phone. Jacobs was stunned, but said little.
The Times picked up the story. Asked how his deal with the Nederlanders would affect his relationship with the Shuberts and Bernie Jacobs, Bennett said they’d “been friends for too long” to let it get in the way.
Jacobs, ominously, declined to comment.
But he cou
ld not let the deal go through. He cut Marvin Krauss out of Dreamgirls because Krauss had thrown Bennett a birthday party, so how could he possibly stand by while Bennett went into business with his rival? Although he and Nederlander had gotten along during their joint production of Nicholas Nickleby in 1981, the rivalry, by 1984, had heated up again. The Shuberts produced Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George that year at the Booth Theatre. The Nederlanders, meanwhile, were coproducers of Jerry Herman’s La Cage aux Folles, which was at their flagship theater, the Palace. The competition between the two shows was almost as intense as that between Dreamgirls and Nine.
Sunday, about painter Georges Seurat and his devotion, at the exclusion of personal relationships, to his art, was hailed as a groundbreaking, intellectual musical. Frank Rich raved and, exercising his growing influence at the Times, put the paper behind the musical. The Times published story after story on Sunday to gin up ticket sales, which were never spectacular. Around Broadway the paper’s relentless coverage was dubbed “Sunday in the Times with George.”
As for La Cage aux Folles, Rich dismissed it as the “the schmaltziest, most old-fashioned major musical Broadway has seen since Annie, and is likely to be just as popular with children of all ages.”
But La Cage had many champions. They thought Sunday was boring and pretentious. Once again, Broadway split between the Shubert camp and the Nederlander camp. At the Tonys that year, Sunday was up for ten awards, La Cage for nine. But the evening broke for La Cage, which picked up six major awards, including Best Musical. Sunday won just two. Accepting his award for Best Score, Herman said it was affirmation that “the simple, hummable show tune” was not dead—a remark widely interpreted as a jab at Sondheim’s complex, not-so-hummable songs.
Without the Tony for Best Musical, Sunday began to sputter at the box office, and Jacobs took to calling a show he once thought was a work of brilliance “a piece of shit.”8
The Shuberts were also battling the Nederlanders for control of the new theater being built inside the Marriott Marquis Hotel. Because the Shuberts had supported the building of the hotel, they assumed they would get the theater. (The consent decree preventing the company from owning any more theaters in New York was lifted in 1984.) They had Michael Bennett, Robin Wagner, and lighting designer Jules Fisher draw up plans for a state-of-the-art theater. But John Portman, the architect of the Marriott, wasn’t interested in designing a theater. He was building a hotel that happened to have a theater in it. He ignored the Shuberts and designed his own theater. The Shuberts were dismayed that he put the bathrooms in the adjoining hotel lobby and not the theater itself.
Jimmy Nederlander made a bid for the theater. “I don’t care where the bathrooms are,” he told Portman, “just so long as there’s bathrooms.”
In the end, Portman went with Nederlander, who opened the theater in the summer of 1986 with the smash hit Me and My Girl.
The Shuberts and the Nederlanders were fighting again—and Bennett was about to defect. Jacobs pressured Bennett to back out of the deal. The Nederlanders, he argued, could never take care of him or his shows the way the Shuberts did. Bennett resisted. “Don’t you understand, Bernie?” he pleaded. “This is giving me my independence. I want this. Why don’t you want this for me?”
The day came to sign the closing papers. Breglio set up a meeting between Bennett and Nederlander at his law office at 10:00 a.m. By 11:30, Nederlander and his lawyers were still waiting for Bennett. At last, he came through the door looking “ashen and exhausted,” Breglio said, “obviously he had not slept all night.”
Bennett took Breglio aside and whispered, “He will not let me do it.”
“That’s all he said to me,” Breglio recalled. “And I knew what he meant. Something happened that night. Bernie got to him. I’ll never know what he said or did. Michael wouldn’t tell me.”
The Godfather had spoken, and Bennett obeyed. But he resented it. He stopped speaking to Jacobs, even when they met for dinner. “Michael would only talk to me,” Betty Jacobs said. “It was all very strange.”
• • •
Bennett was losing ground on other fronts. Scandal was not going well, partly because, Bennett began to realize, it wasn’t very good. “It was a complete sex show, and it was incoherent,” said John Heilpern. “It was utterly incoherent. I said to Michael, ‘Show me the beginning, the middle, and the end.’ ”
But there was another reason why Scandal stalled out. This celebration of promiscuous sex coincided with the start of the AIDS crisis. And few communities would be as devastated by the disease as the theater world. Already young men in the choruses of several Broadway shows were dying of pneumonia or a rare form of cancer nobody had ever heard of called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Performers who appeared to be healthy would call in sick one day and never return. Around Broadway there were all sorts of theories as to what was going on. The “rare cancer,” as the Times initially called the disease, was said to be caused by drugs gay men used to heighten sexual pleasure.9
Backstage at La Cage one day, a group of gay men were talking about the disease. Everybody knew someone who had died or was suffering from it. Arthur Laurents, the director of the show, claimed he knew what was going on. The previous summer there had been an outbreak of mosquitoes on Fire Island. Clearly they were carrying some sort of plague and had infected many gay men there, Laurents said.
Bennett and his circle of friends worried about the disease as well. During the run of Dreamgirls in Los Angeles in 1982, he took several gay men in the show, including Fritz Holt, the stage manager, to dinner at Joe Allen. They talked about friends who were dead or dying and they made a pact. They were all healthy, obviously, and so they vowed to sleep only with one another.II
Bennett abandoned Scandal the day Treva Silverman’s agent sent over her contract to 890 Broadway. It contained a list of demands, including final script approval. It also stipulated that her name be equal to Bennett’s on the billing. Bennett “exploded” when he read that demand, said Robin Wagner, who was with him when the contract arrived. The billing on a Michael Bennett show was inviolate. It was “conceived, directed, and choreographed by Michael Bennett.” Everyone else came second. And now an unknown writer, whom Bennett was paying $1,000 a week out of his own pocket, wanted to be his equal.
“He tried to tear the contract in half, but it was too thick,” Wagner said. “So he had his secretary cut the pages in half. He put them in an envelope and sent them over to Treva’s agent. Then he told his secretary, ‘Get me two tickets to St. Barts.’ And he left. That was the end of Scandal.”
Henry Krieger, the composer of Dreamgirls, happened to be at the airport in St. Barts the day Bennett arrived. Bennett looked tired and haunted, Krieger thought. Krieger had heard about the collapse of Scandal. He approached Bennett and said, “I know you’ve flown the coop. I know you don’t want anyone to know where you are. I won’t tell anyone I’ve seen you. You have my word on that.”
Bennett put his arm around Krieger. “Of all the people I could have met here, I’m glad it was you,” he said.
• • •
After he returned from St. Barts, Bennett turned his attention to The Children’s Crusade. Robin Wagner designed a model set for Madison Square Garden, complete with a hundred little stick figure boys. Jimmy Webb had nearly completed the score, and John Heilpern had the book pretty well in hand. Bennett wanted to hear it read and sung. Webb banged out the score on the grand piano in Bennett’s office, while Heilpern read all the parts. When they finished, two hours later, they were both exhausted and sweaty.
Bennett jumped up and said, “Well, there’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”
“The good news,” Heilpern said.
“The good news is, I am reconciled with Bernie.”
“That’s the good news?” Heilpern said. “I don’t want to know the bad news.”
“The bad news is, I can’t do your musical because I have to go to London to direct
Chess for him.”
Heilpern was furious. “So how does it feel to be a gun for hire?” he snapped.
“Well, I have to do it,” Bennett responded. “It’s the right thing to do. But don’t worry, when I’m done I will come back to your show.”
Heilpern exploded, “We’ve been farting around on this thing for two years. All the promises you keep making about how I am going to be so fulfilled and so rich—and nothing is happening.”
Bennett leaped to the chalkboard that ran the length of the wall in his office, grabbed a piece of chalk, and began scribbling. “Look,” he said. “You’re going to get two points of the show, right? It’s going to gross $2 million a week. That’s $200,000 a week for you.” He wrote $200,000 on the blackboard. “Let’s say the show runs four or five years.” He wrote down more numbers trailed by more zeroes.
“He’s dancing in front of the blackboard, and suddenly I’m making $400,000 a week,” said Heilpern. “And then he looks at me and goes, ‘And that’s just one company.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, there’s the German company and the French company and the English company.’ He drew more numbers with more zeroes. And then he put down the chalk and said, ‘You’re rich, John.’
“And thus enthused, I went back to my lonely flat and thought, I’m rich! And then I sat down and I thought, I am poor. I am poor. I am not rich! But that was the mesmerizing temptation of Michael Bennett.”
* * *
I. And he was right. Dreamgirls played the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia—and Krauss slipped in a booking fee for himself. He was, effectively, charging the Shuberts to play their own theater. When Jacobs discovered it, he “went apeshit,” said Azenberg.
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