by Stephen Fry
Richard's possible colleagues for the Broadway production were two Americans, James Nederlander, who seemed to own half the theatres in America, and Terry Allen Kramer, who seemed to own half the real estate in Manhattan. They were serious and hard-boiled business people. They had it in their heads that the British couldn't choreograph, and when an American producer has an idea in their head, nothing can shift it, not Mr Muscle, not TNT, not electric-shock treatment.
Jimmy Nederlander was convinced he knew the secret of a good musical.
'It's gotta have heart,' he told me over lunch at the Cote Basque on 55th Street, with Terry, Mike and Robert. 'I saw your show in London and I said to my wife, "Honey, this show has got fucking heart. It's got fucking heart, we should do it." She agreed.'
'It's gotta have proper choreography too,' growled Terry.
Terry Allen Kramer liked to say that, while she wasn't the richest woman in America, she certainly paid more tax than any woman in America. She had at one time owned majority shares in Columbia Pictures as well as having large quantities of oil money and property, including the block on which the Cote Basque, made famous by Truman Capote, stood.
When I had arrived there for the lunch appointment I had found myself almost paralysed by the snootiness of the waiters. New York is an infinitely ritzier and more class-bound city than London. White-gloved, liveried and top-lofty elevator attendants, doormen, chauffeurs and maitres d' can make life hell for those without social confidence. Adrift on an alien shore, all the ease I had amassed over the years that allowed me to meet a headwaiter's eye squarely at the Ritz or Le Caprice now deserted me. Abroad is bloody, as George VI liked to say. Abroad, no matter how high you have climbed the ladders at home, forces you to slide down the snakes and start again.
'Yessssss?' hissed the waiter who floated up to me as I had glanced with overdone nonchalance around the dining-room, the very effort of projecting a casual proprietorial air betraying all the illness at ease and inferiority I was feeling.
'Oh, um, well. I'm meeting some people for lunch, I'm afraid I'm a little early ... should I ... er ... sorry.'
'Name?'
'Stephen Fry. Sorry.'
'Let me see ... I find no reservation under that name.'
'Oh. Sorry! No, that's my name, sorry.'
'Uh! And in what name is the reservation?'
'I think probably in the name of Kramer. Sorry. Do you have a table in the name of Terry Allen Kramer?'
It was as if the current had suddenly been switched on. A smile lit up the waiter's whole countenance, his body language transformed itself from drooping contempt to drooling abasement, quivering attention and hysterical respect.
'Sir, I'm sure Mrs Kramer would love for you to be seated and maybe have a glass of champagne or a cocktail? Would you like something to read while you wait? Mrs Kramer is usually ten minutes late, so perhaps some olives? An ashtray? Anything? Anything at all? Thank you, sir.'
Lordy. And indeed she had been ten minutes late, sweeping in and gathering up Jimmy Nederlander, Mike Ockrent and Robert Lindsay, who by this time had joined me on the uncomfortable anteroom sofa.
A telephone had been brought to the table and plugged into a socket by the wall for her as we sat down. Through this she had hollered instructions to minions at her office during the course of lunch.
When it came time for pudding she looked around the table. 'Who wants dessert? You guys want dessert?'
I nodded with enthusiasm, and she loudly clapped her hands. 'Andre, get the pastry cart.'
Le chariot a patisseries was duly wheeled before us loaded with exquisite delices. Terry Allen Kramer pointed at one more than ordinarily luxurious tower of cream, glazed pastry and crystallized fruits. 'What's that?' she barked.
Andre went into his spiel. 'Madame, it is a mousseline of almandine and nougatine whipped into a sabayon of praline and souffline ...' and so forth. Cutting him short, Terry positioned her hand over the pristine surface of this gorgeous creation and with one long pull dug up a great scoop of it, sucked it from her fingers with a loud smack, cocked her head to one side, thought for a moment and then said, turning her head away from the waiter as she did so, 'Take it away, it's shit.'
Robert and I stared with open mouths. Mike later suggested that she did this to impress us with her ruthlessness, to make us aware that we were expendable and that she took no prisoners. I simply thought it was the single most ghastly thing I had ever seen a human do, and I had once seen a man take out his cock and piss all over the desk of a four-star hotel lobby, splashing a receptionist and two bystanders.
Terry noticed that we were looking at her and smiled grimly. 'The dessert was shit. Shit is shit. Did I say about how important the choreography is?'
If that lunch had been a test we somehow passed it, and Terry and Jimmy duly agreed to pony up.
I went back to England, and Hugh and I set about starting to write for next year's pilot of a Fry and Laurie TV sketch show.
'We should do a tour,' Hugh said.
'A tour?'
'If we agree to a live show around the country then that will force us to write material for it. We're not allowed to do Shakespeare Masterclass, or Dracula ... only new material.'
Although we were not really well known and certainly nothing like as famous as Harry and Ben were becoming, there was a sizeable enough demand for us in college and university towns, it seemed, and a tour was arranged. We wrote and stared out of the window and paced up and down and bought Big Macs and looked out of the window and went for walks and tore at our hair and swore and watched television and bought more Big Macs and swore again and wrote and screamed with horror as the clock showed that another day was over and we looked at what we had written and groaned and agreed to meet again first thing next day whosever turn it was agreeing to arrive with some coffee and Big Macs.
After we had assembled some material I had to go back to New York for Me and My Girl rehearsals. The plan was for me to return after the opening. We would tour and record a one-off Fry and Laurie pilot show to be screened at Christmas and followed the next year by a series.
Me and My Girl rehearsed in Manhattan somewhere down near the Flatiron Building. I had never seen such facilities or met with such order in the course of a theatrical venture. There was a dance room, a song room and even a book room, a huge space dedicated to rehearsing my bits and my bits alone. I even had my own writer's room off it, handsomely supplied with desk, electric typewriter, stationery and coffee percolator. Mike Ockrent led the same production team, but only Robert remained from the British cast. Enn Reitel had taken over from him in London, and would be followed by Gary Wilmot, Karl Howman, Brian Conley, Les Dennis and many others in the course of its long run. Here in New York Robert had Maryann Plunkett, whom I had seen in Sunday in the Park with George, playing opposite him as Sally and George S. Irving as Sir John.
I stayed at the Wyndham, an old-fashioned actor's hotel on 58th Street whose rooms were spacious chintzy suites with bathrooms and fittings that believed it was still 1948. By each bed was a white telephone with no dial or buttons. When you picked up the receiver it connected you to the front desk. 'I'd like to make a call,' you would tell the operator. You gave the number you wanted and hung up. Five minutes or half an hour later, according to whim or luck, the phone would ring, and you would be through. Most nights at about two or three I would be jerked awake by the phone's crashing buzz.
'Yes?'
'Your call to Rome, Italy ...'
'I didn't ask for a call to Rome.'
'My mistake. Wrong number. Thank you.'
At breakfast I fell into the habit of chatting with some of the long-term guests, almost all of them actors or theatre people. A favourite was Raymond Burr, enormously bulky but very kindly and cheerful, despite the habitually tired bloodhound droop of his eyes. He went so far as to ask my advice about doing more Perry Mason on television.
'Do young people remember it?'
'Well, I have to confe
ss it was before my time,' I said to him. 'But I loved Ironside.'
'Why thank you. They don't want to do more Ironside, but there is talk of more Perry Mason. You never saw it?'
'I'm sure television could do with a really good legal series. He was a lawyer, that is right?'
'Oh my. I shall have to tell the producers. I met a smart young Englishman and he had barely heard of Perry Mason. Oh my.'
If Raymond Burr wasn't available for conversation I had in another corner of the breakfast room Broadway's ancient royal couple, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. They spoke to me through each other.
'Oh look, honey, here's the English fellow. I wonder how his rehearsals are going.'
'Not too bad,' I would reply. 'The cast seem amazing to me.'
'He says the cast is amazing! Is he confident of a hit I wonder?'
'Oh well, you know. It's pretty much in the lap of the gods. By which I mean the lap of the critics I suppose.'
'He's calling the critics gods, honey, did you hear that? Gods!'
And so on.
Once rehearsals kicked in, I saw something of the American work ethic. Competition for parts in the chorus was so tough that they never relaxed. During time off the boys and girls were teaching each other new steps, practising vocal scales and warming up or down according to the time of day. And drinking water all the time. We are now so used to it all over the western world that one has to remind oneself that there was a time when young Americans didn't feel naked without a bottle of water in their hands.
I also saw something of the meaning of the star system. It is a kind of paradox of America, the republic that freed itself of the inequitable shackles of monarchy, class and social rank, that it chooses to privilege stars with a status far beyond that of any European duke or prince. As with any true aristocracy, the principles of noblesse oblige apply to stars. Robert told me of the time they all went upstate to film a TV commercial. It was a long and tiring day in humid summer, chorus members were clanking around in medieval armour, pearly suits and fur-lined cloaks, and take after take was called for. As the shoot wore on Robert noticed a diminution in friendliness towards him that he could not understand. He asked Maryann Plunkett whether he had done something wrong.
'Everyone is very tired and very hot, and I think they'd like it to be over.'
'Well, yes, me too,' said Robert, 'but how is that my fault?'
'Robert, you're the star! You're the company leader. You decide if it's time for everyone to wrap and go home.'
'B-but ...' Robert, of course, had been brought up in the self-consciously 'we're all mates here' cooperative atmosphere of British theatre, where no one would ever dare pull starry rank. Because we have a class system in Britain we go out of our way to make sure that it is made plain that everyone is absolutely equal. Because America doesn't, they seem to revel in the power, status and prestige that achievement can bring.
'Robert, it's your duty to make decisions for us ...'
Swallowing nervously, and grateful that none of his British contemporaries were witnessing the moment, he spoke up to the director in front of everyone. 'Right, Tommy. One more take only and then everyone needs to get out of costume and be on their way.'
'Sure, Bob,' said the director. 'Absolutely. Whatever you say.'
Everybody smiled, and Robert learned the duties and responsibilities of stardom.
Me and My Girl tried out in downtown Los Angeles, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, then best known as the location of the annual Academy Awards ceremony. I stayed at the Biltmore Hotel off Pershing Square, almost near enough the theatre to walk. This was Los Angeles, of course, and, as everyone knows, walking is never done there. Besides, when you have rented a bright-red convertible Mustang you want to use it at every opportunity. There was really very little for me to do other than attend the early performances and occasionally offer new snatches of dialogue as required. After a week at the Biltmore, charming as it was, I thought I might as well blow all my per diems on a weekend at the Bel-Air Hotel. For the low, low price of $1,500 a night I had a little bungalow and a beautiful garden in which my own private hummingbird flitted about just for me. On the second night I invited the chorus, who somehow jammed themselves in, drank $600 worth of wine and liquor and vamoosed in a cloud of kisses and extravagant gratitude.
LA was our only try-out town, and the show had gone well enough in front of a mostly elderly subscription audience. Broadway was next, and from here there was no escape and no second chances. It is a known oddity of the New York theatre world that a production is made or broken almost solely by its review in the New York Times. It is the paper, incidentally, not the reviewer, that wields this terrible power. As Bernard Levin once observed, a Barbary Ape could hold the post of Times reviewer and still have the power to close a show. Frank Rich was the current Barbary Ape that we had to please, and there was no knowing until the night whether his thumb would go up or down. If it went down the whole production would fold, Jimmy, Terry and Richard would lose their money, and the cast would all be fired. Humiliation all round.
We had already earned a certain measure of ill will in the town by being the first show to open in the Marriott Marquis Theatre, built as part of a major Times Square reconstruction project. To make way for an enormous new hotel, the much loved Helen Hayes Theatre had been pulled down to such a howl of impassioned protest that the Marriott group promised to integrate a new theatre into the development, and the Marquis was it.
At the dress rehearsal nerves were frayed, and Jimmy Nederlander and Terry Allen Kramer, being denied, as producers, any other outlet for their tension than the pleasure of firing people, had scented blood. Their old insecurity on the issue of the dance numbers resurfaced, and, sitting behind them, I heard mutters and growls about Gillian Gregory, the choreographer. How they thought firing her the day before previews began could possibly help I do not know, but I suppose plenty of shows had been rescued in shorter time than that. I assume they liked the idea of bringing in Tommy Tune or Bob Fosse or some other legend of dance, having them work everyone eighteen hours a day for three days and then telling the world how they had fired asses and saved the show. American entertainment tycoons do like to see themselves cast in the mythological tough uncompromising sonofabitch mould. Theatre people hate dramatics - they get enough of that at work; non-theatre people dramatize everything around them.
I caught hold of Richard Armitage and mentioned that I had heard grumblings.
'Hm,' he said. 'I shall have to do something about that.'
We sat and watched an energetic but somehow spiritless dress rehearsal. The new theatre smelled of carpet glue and wood varnish. It had fluorescent strips for house lights, which meant that they couldn't be faded up or down, but only flickered on and off, killing the atmosphere. Even when they went out the exit signs were so brightly lit you could easily read your programme from their lurid spill. The doors at the back of the auditorium were horribly over-sprung such that, no matter how gently you tried to close them, they made a terrible bang, and if people didn't know about them and let them go without care it was as if a gunshot had gone off. The dancing had been, to my untutored non-specialist eye, spectacular, but Terry Allen Kramer scribbled savagely in her notebook every time a leg kicked or a body twirled.
When finally the curtain came down for the ending she stood and opened her mouth.
'The choreo ...'
Richard's voice drowned her out. 'Damn. Well, those house lights are a disaster. And the doors and the exit signs. But there's nothing we can do about that in time for the first preview. Just nothing. It would take a miracle.'
Terry uttered a harsh bark. 'Nothing? Ha! That's what you think! There's plenty we can do. Bill Marriott is a personal friend. I don't care if I have to wake him up, he'll goddamn sort this out. Someone get me to a phone right now!'
Off she went, steaming and puffing like the iron-clad destroyer she was. Orders were issued and issues ordered, Bill Marriott was jerked from h
is European slumbers and in under an hour electricians were being elevated to the ceiling on scissor-lifts and men in white overalls were removing door springs at the back of the house. In her commanding glory, Terry had forgotten all about the choreography.
I shook Richard by the hand. 'Masterly,' I said. 'If I had a hat, I'd take it off to you.'
By the first preview the atmosphere of the show began to be restored. The doors were now, of course, whisper quiet, the exit signs glowed gently and the house lights were warm and sweetly controllable. I had moved out of the Wyndham and was staying in a most glorious apartment on 59th Street, Central Park South, with a matchless view of the park and Fifth Avenue. It belonged to Douglas Adams, who, with typical generosity, had told me to make free of it. I held a nervous party there the evening of the first night. My parents had flown over, as had Hugh. My Great-Aunt Dita, who had escaped the Nazis in Salzburg and come over to America in the 1940s, was a formidable and terrifying presence. She offered Hugh one of her untipped Pall Mall cigarettes.
'That's very kind,' said Hugh, taking out a full-strength, but filtered, Marlboro Red, 'I prefer these.'
'You some kind of health nut?' said my Aunt, thrusting her pack towards him. 'Take.' Hugh, being the polite fellow he is, took one.
One hour before Me and My Girl's Broadway opening. Between my cousin Danny and his grandmother, Great-Aunt Dita.
Neither Mike Ockrent nor I could face being in the auditorium with the first-night audience. The knowledge that Frank Rich had already been and written his review and that it would be out in just a few hours was almost more than we could bear. We paced up and down in the foyer, consuming gin and tonic after gin and tonic, becoming more and more hysterical with panic, terror and a sense of the absurdity of this whole venture. Our pacing routes would converge, and we kept bumping into each other, which caused us to burst into fresh fits of manic laughter.
'We are at the first night of our own Broadway show,' Mike kept saying, shaking his head in disbelief. 'It can't be true. Someone is going to wake me up.'