Razzle Dazzle Read online

  Berlin withdrew not only from show business but also the world. For the last two decades of his life, he shunned publicity, seldom leaving his elegant Beekman Place mansion.

  He lived to be 101, long enough to see his first hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” enter public domain. “That was a dark day in the house,” his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett recalled. Berlin died in his small bedroom at the top of No. 17 Beekman Place in 1989.

  • • •

  After Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter wrote two more hits, Can-Can and Silk Stockings, but neither had the impact of Kiss Me, Kate. He was in constant pain due to a riding accident in 1937 that left him nearly crippled, and in 1958 one of his legs had to be amputated. He never wrote another song after the operation and died in 1964.

  • • •

  Camelot was the last Broadway show Lerner and Loewe wrote. Loewe drifted into retirement. Lerner found a new partner, Burton Lane, and wrote the gorgeous score to On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. But Lerner’s script, about a woman with ESP, was a disaster. Lerner wrote it while receiving daily injections of amphetamines from Max Jacobson, the infamous “Dr. Feelgood” whose patients included Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, Nelson Rockefeller, and John F. Kennedy. On a Clear Day flopped, as did every other show Lerner wrote after that until his death in 1986.

  Frank Loesser wrote two wonderful shows after Guys and Dolls—the operatic The Most Happy Fella in 1956 and the sharp corporate satire How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1961. But his 1965 show Pleasures and Palaces closed out of town. He died of cancer in 1969.

  By the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein, who’d written West Side Story and Wonderful Town, had left Broadway for the New York Philharmonic. He wrote one more original musical—1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with Alan Jay Lerner—but it flopped. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were still at it in the 1960s, but shows such as Do Re Mi and Subways Are for Sleeping were no match for On the Town or even Bells Are Ringing, which they wrote with composer Jule Styne in 1956.

  • • •

  Though its golden age was passing, Broadway, in the early to midsixties, was still vigorous. New talents that had grown up with the shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein were emerging. In 1959, a couple of cabaret writers, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, wrote the hit Bye Bye Birdie, a satire of the Elvis Presley craze. Its rock numbers were parodies of Presley songs, while its pop hit—“Put on a Happy Face”—was an old-fashioned showtune.

  Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick wrote the delightful Fiorello! toward the end of the golden age, but they created their masterpiece—Fiddler on the Roof—in 1964. Based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem, it was set in the waning days of the shtetls of Russia as life for the Jews was becoming increasingly unbearable under the czar. Fiddler on the Roof was the perfect show for a Broadway whose audience was predominantly Jewish. Many theatergoers would have heard stories of shtetl life from their parents or grandparents. And the protagonist Tevye’s struggle to preserve Jewish traditions in the face of a changing and often dangerous world would have resonated with theatergoers grappling with images of Auschwitz and Dachau. Fiddler ran 3,242 performances, making it at that point the longest-running show in Broadway history.

  Jerry Herman, a composer and lyricist, wrote two of the biggest hits of the 1960s—Hello, Dolly!, starring Carol Channing, and Mame, starring Angela Lansbury. Herman’s parents worked in summer camps in the Catskills and the Berkshires. His father was a gym teacher, his mother an English teacher and part-time performer. Herman directed musicals at the summer camps. By the time he was fifteen, he had learned the entire American popular songbook. A self-taught musician, he also composed little tunes of his own. One of his mother’s bridge partners knew Frank Loesser, so Mrs. Herman arranged for her sixteen-year-old son to meet the celebrated composer. Herman showed up at Loesser’s office in the Brill Building wearing a neatly pressed suit and “carrying my little briefcase full of my ditties,” he recalled. The meeting, originally scheduled for half an hour, turned into a lengthy musical audition. Loesser wanted to hear every one of Herman’s songs. “Suddenly,” Herman said, “he turned to me and said, ‘Do you mind if I call your parents?’ I gave him their number, and he told them that even though this is a very tough business, he believed I had something worth pursuing. The course of my life changed that day.”3

  Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones caught Broadway’s attention with a little Off-Broadway show called The Fantasticks in 1960. It featured the popular song “Try To Remember.” Schmidt, who came to New York from Dallas, wrote the melody in about five minutes. He rented a rehearsal room in the Steinway Building—“I couldn’t afford a piano back then,” he said—and spent most of the hour composing a complicated melody that was going nowhere. “It was a hot day, there was no air conditioning, and I was tired,” he recalled. “I had a few minutes rehearsal time left, and I didn’t want to waste them. So I just put my hands on the piano and thought, I’ll just play a simple song. I played ‘Try To Remember’ from start to finish without changing a note. But I didn’t know it was my song. I’d been to Europe that summer and I just assumed it was a folk song I’d heard along the way.” A few days later he played it for Jones, who thought, folk song or not, it would work well in The Fantasticks. Jones wrote the lyrics aboard the Staten Island ferry on his way to visit his girlfriend.

  The Fantasticks would eventually become the longest-running musical of all time (for every dollar invested the backers received $700). Producer David Merrick liked it, and hired Schmidt and Jones to write two modest Broadway hits in the sixties—110 in the Shade, based on the N. Richard Nash play The Rainmaker, and a charming two-character revue about marriage called I Do! I Do! It starred Mary Martin and Robert Preston, both at the peak of their box office drawing powers.

  Another songwriting team that sprang up in the early 1960s became known as Kander and Ebb.

  John Kander, who came from a rich Jewish family in Kansas City, had been the rehearsal pianist for Gypsy in 1959. He wrote his first musical, A Family Affair, with James and William Goldman. Rehearsals were chaotic and two weeks before the show opened on Broadway, Kander begged his friend, producer Hal Prince, to take over the direction. A Family Affair was Hal Prince’s directorial debut.

  Born and raised in New York, Fred Ebb studied English literature at Columbia University. Whenever he had a few dollars in his pocket, he bought a ticket to a Broadway show, usually a musical. He wrote lyrics and special material for nightclub performer Kaye Ballard. He realized a good song needed a few things. The first was a catchy title. Frank Loesser, he thought, always came up with good titles—“On a Slow Boat to China,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”4 The second was an unexpected twist at the end. One of Ebb’s early songs was called “I Never Loved Him Anyhow.” A woman sings about breaking up with a man she says she never really loved in the first place. “I never loved him anyhow,” she says at the end of the song. There’s a beat. “Well, not much.”

  Tommy Valando, the music publisher, introduced Kander and Ebb. The first song they wrote was “My Coloring Book,” which became a modest hit for Barbra Streisand, who had become a Broadway star in Funny Girl. Hal Prince asked them to write the score for his new show, Flora the Red Menace, in which a nineteen-year-old Liza Minnelli made her Broadway debut.

  Kander and Ebb’s next show solidified their partnership and made them one of the most famous songwriting teams of the 1960s and seventies. Hal Prince acquired the rights to I Am a Camera, a 1951 play based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin. The setting was a seedy nightclub in Berlin in the early thirties as the Nazis were coming to power. The protagonists were Sally Bowles, a second-rate singer but first-rate party girl, and an American writer named Cliff Bradshaw. Given the cabaret setting, Prince thought the material could be adapted as a musical. He hired Joe Masteroff to write the book, and Kander and Ebb to do the score. Cabaret opened November 20, 1966, at the Broadhurst Theatre and shocked audiences. A show called Cabaret, they as
sumed, would be a lighthearted romp in a nightclub. The songs were catchy, but the seediness of the cabaret, the creepiness of the Master of Ceremonies (a brilliant Joel Grey), and the backdrop of National Socialism on the rise were unsettling. And Ebb came up with a sensational lyric twist. At the end of the song “If You Could See Her,” Joel Grey, who had been dancing with the love of his life, a gorilla, sang, “If you could see her through my eyes,” and then whispered, “she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” It was a brutal expression of the anti-Semitism coursing through Germany in the 1930s. But Jewish theatergoers were offended. Some Jewish groups boycotted the musical during its Boston tryout because of the song. Ebb changed the last line to “She isn’t a Mieskeit at all,” taking some of the sting out of the song. (Bob Fosse, who directed the Oscar-winning 1972 movie, reinstated the original lyric, and it’s been used in revivals ever since.)

  Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy, had a hit in the 1960s with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for which he wrote both lyrics and music. But his next two shows—Anyone Can Whistle and Do I Hear a Waltz?—were flops. A third show, Company, was a modest hit, but a fourth, Follies, was a flop. First directed by Hal Prince, Company and Follies today are considered classics of the American musical theater. Only a few critics praised them at the time, however, and their brittle, cynical tone left audiences cold.

  • • •

  Hal Prince wasn’t the only influential director who worked regularly on Broadway in the 1960s. Though he was spending more and more time creating dances for the New York City Ballet, Jerome Robbins, probably the greatest director-choreographer in the American musical theater, pitched in (uncredited) and helped save two shows floundering in tryouts, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Funny Girl. And he directed and choreographed the biggest hit of the sixties—Fiddler on the Roof.

  Robbins was every producer’s number one choice to stage a new musical. If he wasn’t available—and he was very difficult to get—Gower Champion was usually the second choice. Tall, handsome, suave, Champion and his wife Marge were popular dancers in Hollywood musicals. But Champion, who’d danced in Broadway shows in the 1940s, wanted to be more than a performer. He got his chance to direct a little show called Lend an Ear in 1948, and cast a young, oddball performer with a high-pitched but gravelly voice named Carol Channing. Champion’s first hit was Bye Bye Birdie. Then came Carnival!, a lovely, gentle show produced by David Merrick. Champion and Merrick’s next show—Hello, Dolly!—cemented the partnership, which continued to flourish with I Do! I Do!

  The fourth major Broadway director of the sixties was Bob Fosse. The inventor of jazz dancing (“jazz hands!”) on Broadway, Fosse choreographed The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees in the 1950s, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1961. He codirected the hit musical comedy Little Me in 1962. It had a delightful score by composer Cy Coleman and lyricist Carolyn Leigh. During the out-of-town tryout, Fosse, exercising total control over the show, altered some of Leigh’s lyrics. When she found out, she called the police and ordered them to arrest him as well as book writer Neil Simon and producer Cy Feuer. Turning to Coleman, she said, “Him, you can leave to me.”5

  Fosse had another hit with Sweet Charity in 1966. Based on the Fellini movie Nights of Cabiria, it softens the subject matter—prostitution—by turning the title character into a dancer for hire in a Times Square dance hall. Charity was played by Fosse’s wife, Gwen Verdon, who delivered her customary quirky, stylish, and, in the end, heartbreaking performance. The score, by Coleman and Dorothy Fields, was a winner, too. Sweet Charity ran nearly two years at the Palace Theatre.

  • • •

  Musicals have always been the financial engine of Broadway. But nonmusical plays were in good supply in the sixties as well. The most successful writer of the era was Neil Simon. His plays performed like musicals at the box office. Simon honed his skill for gags and jokes in television, most famously in the legendary writers’ room on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Eager to get out of television, Simon wrote his first play, Come Blow Your Horn, in 1960. It ran more than six hundred performances. His next comedy, Barefoot in the Park, was an even bigger hit. A charming comedy about newlyweds living in a walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village—Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley—it ran 1,530 performances. And then came the gold mines—The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, The Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Collectively, these plays ran more than three thousand performances in the 1960s. Simon was a Broadway superstar. All his producer, Saint Subber, had to do back then was take out an ad in the New York Times announcing “A new play by Neil Simon . . .” and there would be lines at the box office. No writer in the history of the theater made as much money as Simon in the sixties and seventies. One estimate in 1974 put his weekly income, from Broadway alone, at nearly $50,000. In 1968, he bought his own theater, the Eugene O’Neill on West Forty-Ninth Street. He was the first playwright since David Belasco to become his own landlord.

  With Neil Simon and Jerry Herman cranking out hits; David Merrick producing a show a year (sometimes two or three); and Hal Prince, Gower Champion, Jerome Robbins, and Bob Fosse all working at the top of their game, Broadway was a good investment in the 1960s. Ten years before, during Broadway’s golden age, attendance averaged seven million a year. But in the 1967–68 season, with The Odd Couple, Hello, Dolly!, I Do! I Do!, Fiddler on the Roof, and many other shows on the boards, nearly 10 million people went to Broadway. The Shuberts’ seventeen theaters were always booked. There was no reason for the head of the company, Larry Shubert, to abandon his spot at the Sardi’s bar.

  But just four years later, the Broadway audience would be cut in half. Shubert theaters would be dark. And Larry Shubert didn’t get off his bar stool. He ordered another “blast” as an empire crumbled.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  New York, New York, a Helluva Mess

  William Goldman, a journalist and playwright who would go on to write Oscar-winning screenplays, spent a year—1967 to 1968—studying the Broadway theater. The book that resulted, The Season, is still devoured by theater lovers. It’s a sharp, candid, witty tour of the Great White Way, and although much has changed in the theater business in forty-five years, many of Goldman’s observations are still timely. Broadway, he noted, was a high-risk business. But if you have a smash, you earn set-for-life money. Citing Variety, Goldman noted the 1967–68 season was lucrative, with gross receipts totalling $60 million. He didn’t ignore Broadway’s problems—escalating costs, a paucity of good American playwrights, lack of young, vibrant producers, hot young actors such as Robert Redford running off to Hollywood—but he concluded Broadway was far from dead. There was still plenty of money to be scooped up in Shubert Alley.

  But on the last page of The Season, Goldman reports on a class he taught at a college just outside New York. The students were aspiring screenwriters, and they discussed the key movies of the day—Dr. Strangelove, The Pawnbroker, Blow-Up, Tom Jones. Then he asked this class of bright young writers what their memorable Broadway experiences were. “And no one raised a hand,” he writes.

  Goldman caught the tail end of Broadway’s robust run in the sixties. In 1968, 9.5 million people took in a Broadway show, according to Variety. After that, the numbers began to slide, precipitously. In 1970, attendance dropped to 7.4 million. A year later, it dipped to 6.5 million. The bottom fell out in 1972. Only 5.4 million tickets were sold, the fewest in Broadway history. How, within just four years, did the theater industry lose nearly half its audience?

  Broadway weathered competition from the movies in the thirties and forties and television in the fifties. What it nearly didn’t survive, toward the end of the sixties, was rock music. Once the Beatles hit town, Broadway became something to take your grandmother to on a Sunday afternoon. The change in popular culture played out on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan began his career as a sports columnist for the New York Evening Graphic and then took over the Broadway b
eat when Walter Winchell left the Graphic for the Daily Mirror. Sullivan eventually took his Broadway column to the New York Daily News. He loved the theater, especially musicals. One of his best friends was Richard Rodgers who, along with his writing partner Oscar Hammerstein II, appeared on the very first episode of Sullivan’s show, then called Toast of the Town. In 1960, Julie Andrews and Richard Burton appeared on Sullivan’s program to sing songs from Camelot, which had just opened to mixed reviews. Nearly 12 million people watched the episode and the exposure helped Camelot overcome the reviews and rack up a run of nearly nine hundred performances. But by the late sixties, Broadway shows were not cropping up as often on Sullivan’s program. The acts he booked instead were the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, the Jackson 5, the Supremes, Sly and the Family Stone, and the Doors. Sullivan still loved “Some Enchanted Evening”—but he could not afford to ignore popular music’s new stars. How square, suddenly, does Ethel Merman look singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” next to Jim Morrison singing “Light My Fire”?

  Broadway did little to keep up with changing tastes in music. One exception, Hair, appeared in 1968, but it did not originate on Broadway. It began at the Public Theater, Joseph Papp’s dynamic Off-Broadway theater down on Lafayette Street. Few people thought Hair could make it on Broadway. None of the big producers of the day—Merrick, Prince, Bloomgarden—would touch it. Michael Butler, a rich Chicago businessman who campaigned against the Vietnam War, produced it. The Shuberts wouldn’t give him a theater—the show featured three seconds of nudity, for heaven’s sake!—so Butler wound up going to the small Biltmore Theatre on West Forty-Seventh Street, owned by a family friend. Hair was a sensation. It ran 1,750 performances. But it hardly caused a revolution on Broadway. The next rock musical, playing Off-Broadway, was Your Own Thing, which no one remembers today. Another show called Soon lasted three performances.