Hadleigh - Broadway Babylon: glamour, glitz, and gossip on the Great White Way

Senior Editor: Mark Glubke

Project Editor: Gary Sunshine

Interior Design: Julie Duquet

Production Manager: Salvatore Destro

Copyright 2007 by Boze Hadleigh

First published in 2007 by Back Stage Books,

an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications,

Nielsen Business Media,

a division of The Nielsen Company

www.watsonguptill.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006937256

eISBN: 978-0-307-83013-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systemswithout written permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace the ownership of and to obtain permission to reproduce the quotes in this book. The author, editors, and publisher sincerely apologize for any inadvertent errors or omissions and will be happy to correct them in future editions.

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To Ronnie and to all
the plays and musicals
weve loved before

By the same author:

Bette Davis Speaks
Celebrity Diss & Tell
Celebrity Feuds!
Celebrity Lies!
Celluloid Gaze
The Films of Jane Fonda
Hispanic Hollywood
Hollywood and Whine
Hollywood Babble On
Hollywood Gays
Hollywood Lesbians
Holy Matrimony!
In or Out
The Lavender Screen
Leading Ladies
Sing Out!

M y mother sometimes wished me to get a PhD, as my father had donefor a professor, its mandatory. This book is the closest Id want to get: a PhD in Broadway history. The project was long, massive, and fascinating. Researching it was an education, but a joyful one: putting it together was lengthy and necessarily interrupted (on three continents!). My trimmed-down manuscript finally weighed in at 642 typewritten pages when sent to Back Stage Books for further trimming by other hands.

Over the years Ive relished theatre books by othersfrom A to Ken Mandelbaum and Ethan Mordden to Z for Zadan, Craigand its shocking to realize that Broadway is now only a fraction as musically, journalistically, and socioeconomically influential as three or four decades ago. Even so, the dimmer memories survive colorfully in my mind.

Speaking of which, there are several to thank, starting as always with my partner and associate Ronald Boze Stockwell. And my sister Linda for a multitude of clippings. My originating editor, Mark Glubke, my current editor, Bob Nirkind, and my copy editor, Michle LaRue. Gary Sunshine, my project editor, enthusiastically helped shape and diet down this book. Producer Ben Bagley wanted to do a book together, and died much too soon. Truman Capote encouraged me, as did Sandy Dennis, Charlie Earle, Richard Condon, and Chad Oberhausen.

Thanks to Bea Arthur, Robert Clary, Frederick Combs, David Cravatts, Bette Davis, Mitch Douglas, Dody Goodman, Julie Harris, Arthur Laurents, Cameron Mackintosh, Rose Marie, Jim Pinkston, Charles Nelson Reilly, George Rose, Maureen Stapleton, Kenzo Tanaka, and Frederick Ziffel (no relation to Arnolds father).

Its a surprise and delightful treat that my book Bette Davis Speaks is being turned into a play, A Couple of Bettes, by screenwriter-producer Dan Gordon, to star the talented Linda Gray. Coincidence: Boze is (I am), of course, a character in the three-person play, and one of Bettes early films included a character first-named Boze: The Petrified Forest, based, like so many screen classics, on a Broadway play. (Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart costarred in the stage and movie versions.)

As with nearly every star of Hollywoods golden era, Ms. Davis came to motion pictures via the theater, with Broadway experience and acclaim in her pocket. Sadly, she remarked that fewer young actors than ever were taking that route. Acting schools, commercials, and even television, she declared, are not a substitute. When you have worked on Broadway, you have been tested in fire. You have worked with the best, with professional discipline and glowing self-confidenceif not at the start of the run, then by its end. Broadway improves any actor.

Although about half of my seventeen books have been the basis of TV programs or documentaries here and abroad, that one of them will be that living, breathing, and actable thing, A Play, is particularly gratifying.

Now, on with the show!

T heater is Acting. In person, in sequence, and for a live audience. It is not a pre-packaged product, like performing for the cameralittle or big screen. Real actors tread the boards, and real theater starsin the United Statesplay Broadway. Once the mecca of American entertainment, Broadwayand to a lesser but vital extent Off-Broadwayremains the pinnacle of play and stage musical entertainment in this country.

Although the Great White Way no longer yields a majority of popular cultures hit songs, it retains an enduring mystique and glamour, and occasionally creates a new star, such as 411 full-sized 2003 Tony-winner Marissa Jaret Winokur, who pre-award already had a post-Hairspray TV series deal. Notwithstanding a depressed economy and lingering decline in tourism since 9/11, the 20052006 Broadway season set an all-time record of $861.6 million. If Broadway is no longer a habit, its now an Eventan expensive oneand its more-famous shows are eagerly awaited from coast to coast and in between.

A Broadway hit like The Producers can revitalize a fading screen career, like Matthew Brodericks; and as with Hairspray or The Producers, a musical formatAmericas gift to the worldcan resurrect and re-commercialize a straight play or film from long ago. The challenge and prestige of Broadway still lure movie stars with integrity, such as Hugh Jackman, who dazzlingly proved his versatility and earned a Tony for his performance in The Boy from Oz, playing fellow Australian Peter Allen, who flopped big-time as an American gangster in an earlier musical. Not all projects are potentially tuneful; Carrie, the Stephen King musical, was a legendary disaster.

Its worth remembering that during the McCarthy witch hunts and blacklists, it was on Broadway and in theater generally where a writer, performer, director, etcetera, whose politics Congress or the White House disapproved of, could find work when none was available in TV or on screen. The stage has always been more welcoming and inclusive, also more daring and innovative, than the mass media.

Broadway Babylon is an affectionate, hopefully entertaining, and informative overview of Broadway past and present. It is necessarily selective and by choice nonchronological. Oh, my God! Not another stage textbook, shuddered Bea Arthur over the telephone. No way, I assured her. (The LA-based trouper, 80, had just returned from touring her one-woman Broadway show in England and South Africa.)

The death, specifically Broadways, of the American theater has been repeatedly predicted. However, despite the incursions of television, cable, video, DVD, computer games, etcetera, Broadway still pulsates with energy, creativity, and glamorous appeal, for its spectacles, artists, and immediacy are timeless and fill a need that has endured some 2,500 years, ever since Thespis stepped out of the chorus to seize audiences attention and touch their dreams.