Chapter 10

Bobby Griffith and I met James and William Goldman when we were doing Tenderloin. They tried to help some in the writing of it, but it was too late. Still, I acquired from Jim the script of a play he had written, They Might Be Giants. It was about a wealthy American with a Sherlock Holmes fixation, and about his family, who sent him to a psychoanalyst to have him declared insane so they could get their hands on his money. A fascinating play, beautifully written, imaginatively constructed—THEATRE.

Early that season, I had been exposed for the first time to the work of Joan Littlewood via her production of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. I was crazy about it. The sure yet impulsive way she maneuvered currents of reality and fantasy compatibly in one play was something. And I admired how she cued in fragments of songs—the show had many—and how they erupted from rather than grew out of moments. They had the abrasive effect of attacking when you least expected, creating such life.

Sondheim and I talked about that play then and for years, and a decade later the songs in Company were cued out of a conscious debt to The Hostage. We were in Boston with Tenderloin when I read Jim Goldman’s play. I promptly scrawled a note to Joan Littlewood on some Touraine Hotel stationery, saying something like, “You don’t know me, but I do know you and this is a play I’m enclosing which I think is extraordinary.” I mailed it to her in London, and by the time we got back to New York, there was a reply. “You’re right. I agree with you. Let’s do it.” And that was that. We scheduled rehearsals in June at the Theatre Royal Stratford, in the East End of London.

What made me take an American play about American people to an English director? I wanted to work with her. At the time I didn’t know how much she relied on improvisation and how little on fixed material. She’d done the play I’ve just mentioned and Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’Be and A Taste of Honey, and they were wonderful. But the Behan play was reported to have been less than one act long when she went into rehearsal and A Taste of Honey similarly a string of scenes, with no cohesive theatrical shape.

Fings was the first Lionel Bart musical, and together they improvised it in a kind of freewheeling style, a precursor, perhaps, of Tom O’Horgan’s Hair. What was so marvelous about all that was a curious irreverence and sloppy excitement—nothing constipated there.

The trouble was Jim Goldman had written a play. A tight, carefully polished play. I’ve never seen what Joan Littlewood did with Shakespeare. I would be inclined to guess, not very much. She doesn’t take to discipline. The Goldman play was the wrong one to send her.

Meantime, Tenderloin opened in New York and hobbled through the winter months, and Kuprin opened and closed. We had yet to meet Littlewood. Then, early in June, Bobby Griffith, who was playing golf with George Abbott, collapsed on the ninth hole at the Westchester Country Club and died the next morning.

Giants went into rehearsal in June as scheduled. There were too many things for me to do in New York, so instead of being in London for that period, I managed to get away three days before the scheduled London opening.

Jim Goldman greeted me apprehensively at the stage door and ushered me to a seat in the rear of the second balcony. Joan didn’t like producers much.

Littlewood’s image of producers was Billy Rose. She referred to me: “When that Billy Rose gets here from New York . . .” but Jim assured me it would change when she met me.

The rehearsal I watched was confusing. As I became oriented, I realized that the leading man’s lines were being spoken by a woman. Odd. It is part of Littlewood’s technique to switch the roles around to give the actors a sense not only of their roles but also of the total experience of the play. A valuable exercise, no doubt, but we were three days from an opening.

Jim didn’t seem perturbed when I expressed surprise. At the end of that rehearsal, he took me down to meet Joan Littlewood. It was immediately clear that they’d fallen in love—artistically. He was a playwright and her theatre, in the still bombed-out slums of East London, was run on a sound Bolshevik line. (Littlewood was the chairman.) Together they constituted a phalanx I could not shake. I didn’t even try. I was too late, so I backed away and let it all happen.

Not surprisingly, two days before the scheduled opening she asked for one more week’s rehearsal. They had had almost two months.

I spoke with Avis Bunnage and Harry Corbett, the leads in the production and longtime Littlewood actors, and on their advice I forced the opening date. After all, it was the East End, and Littlewood had always done her best work after an opening. Our reviews down there wouldn’t affect a subsequent move to the West End after she’d fixed the production. This was Littlewood’s pattern, and unless I forced her to open on time, the exercises would continue. All of this had been borne out by previous productions of The Hostage and Sparrers Can’t Sing.

That decision was my sole contribution as producer.

She didn’t like it, but once it had been made, she pushed herself to be ready, which simply wasn’t possible in the two remaining days. But I had discounted this opening as the equivalent of New Haven, so in that context I wasn’t too apprehensive.

We opened with the predicted disaster, and Littlewood accepted full responsibility for it.

For her, however, this had not been the same as the previous Stratford openings. She had fashioned those plays, in a sense co-authored them. This one had come to her total. Goldman chooses his words carefully, directs his scenes with precision, even providing detailed stage directions. All of this she admired, but it was contrary to the best of her experience.

Instead of improvising chaos, she should have mounted his play.

One of her masterpieces, Oh, What a Lovely War!, a musical revue about World War I, was rough-hewn, abrasive, and improvised. Giants was a well-made play and not her forte. She knew it only too late, and out of her upset at letting Jim Goldman down, she closed her theatre and fled to Nigeria. Giants was the last of the Theatre Royal productions for many years, the last of that acting company.

Returning late on the afternoon of the day we closed, I found her waiting for me in the lobby of the Savoy Hotel, wearing, as always, the tam-o’-shanter and tartan skirt which were her uniform, clutching a string bag containing a head of cabbage, some apples, turnip greens, and a Georgian silver flask inscribed in memory of Giants. Littlewood and Giants had closed the most audacious English-speaking theatre company of the 1950s, and I had introduced them to each other. (Predictably, Littlewood came home and is working again in that theatre.)

Jim and I returned to New York, and he suggested I direct it. I agreed eagerly, but I knew there was something wrong with the play. The Littlewood production had so obscured what was right that I arranged a reading of it.

I sent it to George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, who seemed perfect casting to me, offering them the leads. They accepted at once. There had never been any equivocation when it came to Jim’s script.

About this time Mike Nichols asked me what my plans were for Giants. Mike had yet to direct a play. It figured in his plans and he would love to start with They Might Be Giants.

Arrangements for the reading went forward. We rented a room at the Astor Hotel, assembled a cast including Scott and Dewhurst, and though they read well, I got no closer to what was wrong with the play.

The reason was I couldn’t hear them. Instead, I kept hearing the performance I had seen in England. Those actors, their voices—I kept seeing their moves. I hadn’t liked that production, still I couldn’t shake it off. It was indelibly in my head.

A few years later I did She Loves Me, and eight years after that I was asked to make a film of it. I was excited, and we cast it well with Jerry Orbach and Joan Hackett. The Hungarian government offered unheard-of cooperation, to the extent that they would restore sections of Budapest, restaurants, and hotels to what they’d been before the war. And once again I couldn’t start fresh. I couldn’t seem to move away from the original stage production. It became a game of trying to recall what we’d done before, remembering too much on the one hand and not enough on the other.

I’ve always been amazed at directors, the classical ones usually, who can reinterpret plays over and over again in a lifetime. I can’t do that now. I would like to someday.

I certainly couldn’t do it with Giants. Unhappily, I told Jim as much at the end of the reading in the Astor. True, I could hold forth for hours about Littlewood’s mistakes, but given the chance, I couldn’t take advantage of them. And because I couldn’t, reluctantly I relinquished the play.

Scott and Dewhurst picked it up, but subsequently dropped it. Kermit Bloomgarden optioned it for a time. It went that way from hand to hand, but it never got to Broadway.

I don’t know what happened with Mike Nichols. Probably then it was too late. As for the others, I suspect in each instance they discovered something was wrong with it, and, as with a brilliant puzzle, the solution for it was always out of reach.

Because of the London production, Bobby and I retained the motion-picture rights. In 1968 they were purchased by Universal for a film starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward, and directed by Anthony Harvey. There was no cash in front from our point of view, but we would participate once the film was made. It was, and we did, and since then we have recouped all the money we lost in 1961. Which is probably the only time in my life that will happen.

REFLECTIONS ON CHAPTER 10
of Contradictions

The Touraine Hotel was my choice of digs because, as a stage manager, I received a free room in return for recommending the apartments to our cast. I hadn’t absorbed the fact that I could stay wherever I chose.

• • •

Joan Littlewood was as unconventional as she was brilliant. I regard The Hostage, A Taste of Honey, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’Be, and Oh, What a Lovely War! among the most successful and potentially influential theatre pieces I’ve ever seen. The problem is they couldn’t be influential because no one worked as she did. She was a co-author of all of those plays. There are rumors that she started one of them with little more than a dozen pages and improvised the rest with the actors.

Actually, few know this: George Abbott went into rehearsal with Nanette Fabray and Phil Silvers in High Button Shoes with a fragment of a script, and he too improvised the rest of it from the first day of rehearsal. It became a box office hit.

• • •

I had forgotten that my first choice for the film of She Loves Me was a young Barbra Streisand. But she was rejected out of hand. The American money hadn’t heard of her and had doubts as to whether the camera would love her. To this day I regret that film was never made.

While I’m on the subject of directing films: when I finally got around to it, I realized how ill suited I was to the task. I was too old to start from scratch and clearly not interested enough to learn the craft or to shadow a first-rate film director. I had beginner’s luck with Something for Everyone. But in that case I had a great script from Hugh Wheeler, solid gold in cinematographer Walter Lassally, and platinum with Angela Lansbury and Michael York.

Some years later, I went back to the well with A Little Night Music and I think I made a mess of it, and not only because I had a hard time working with Elizabeth Taylor. My excuse for all of this is boredom—the amount of time between setting up a shot and actually shooting it can amount to hours. I’m not that fellow.

However, working with two stars, Angela Lansbury and Elizabeth Taylor, I did learn something about film acting. Angela, who is stage-trained, projected: I understood what she was doing as she was doing it. It was epic theatre, as Meyerhold and Piscator defined it. It’s where I shine, and it was thrilling to watch Angie in front of the camera. With Elizabeth it was entirely different. I would often have to turn to the cameraman to ask, “Did she do it?” It was so little I couldn’t see it. Usually I had to go to the rushes to see if I had gotten what I wanted. Nonetheless, she knew how to act for the camera, and when she was good, she was very good.

I did make an attempt at one other film. I had an idea for a film version of Follies that I tried to sell. It would be about the last days of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. We would give a gala party on the sound stage at MGM and invite every movie star in the world (and design it as a benefit for the actors’ home in Woodland Hills). I wanted to use the documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker to shoot the stars attending the reunion. And then I wanted to place the story of Follies in the middle of all this! Thanks to John Springer, the famous Hollywood publicist, I heard from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who said they would like to be in the film: Davis wanted to sing “I’m Still Here,” while Crawford would sing “Broadway Baby.” Springer said, “Can you imagine those two women singing those songs? Perfection.”

I went to see Dan Melnick at MGM and tried hard to sell him my idea. But he turned me down. A year later, MGM produced That’s Entertainment! My concept for a film of Follies is the one movie I know I could have made because it invited so much improvisation and I wouldn’t have gotten bored.