My audition took place in a dimly lit, empty theater off Broadway, somewhere in the Forties. It was an overcast winter day. I walked into the theater and took off my jacket; I wore a sweater and khakis. There were only a few people there, including Gower, a handsome, serious man. It looked and felt how I imagine most people picture a Broadway audition—dark, austere, tense, and scary.
Gower and his producers sat at a table in front. I stayed in the back until I heard my name, then took my place on the stage. There was one light shining down and a piano player on the side.
After answering a few questions, I sang “Till There Was You” from The Music Man and then “Once in Love with Amy” with a little soft-shoe that I knew. When I finished, Gower came onstage and said, “You’ve got the part.” Just like that. He gave me the job. Right on the spot.
I didn’t know what the hell to say, and what I eventually said sounded completely wrong.
“But I … I can’t really dance.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I saw what you can do. That’s what we’ll build on. I’ll teach you to dance.”
Those lessons paid off handsomely. With a book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics from Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, respectively, Birdie was a takeoff on the mania that swept through the youth of America when Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army in 1958. After I saw a run-through of the number “Telephone Hour,” I called my wife and told her that this show was going to go and probably do very well. It felt like everything worked.
From day one, the show had a special feel, at least among those of us on the inside, a remarkable cast featuring Dick Gautier as Conrad Birdie, Susan Watson as Kim MacAfee, Paul Lynde as her father, Kay Medford as my mother, Chita Rivera as my assistant, Rosie Alvarez, and me in the role of agent and songwriter Albert Peterson. Michael J. Pollard played the kid, Hugo, and Charles Nelson Reilly was Mr. Henkel, in addition to my understudy.
We rehearsed at the Phyllis Anderson Theater on Fourteenth Street, near the great old German restaurant Luchow’s, in the heart of what had once been the Yiddish theater district. Chita and I met on the first day of rehearsals and instantly hit it off. Both of us were clowns and made each other laugh. Gower sent us home one day after we couldn’t stop ourselves from laughing. He was a quiet man and under a lot of stress from directing and choreographing the show, and he just snapped.
“Just go home!” he said.
We left the theater like naughty schoolchildren, laughing even though we knew nothing was funny. I thought we were going to get fired.
I lucked out being able to dance with Chita. She was a natural, a whiz-bang genuine crowd-pleaser. I didn’t have to do much of anything except move with her, and as a result, I ended up looking like Fred Astaire. Her husband, Tony Mordente, later spotlighted in West Side Story, was understudying the role of Birdie and assisting Gower, and he grew jealous of how chummy Chita and I became.
He was jealous of any guy who got near Chita or gave her a look. He blew up if a cabdriver said something to her. All of a sudden he got the idea Chita and I were stepping out on him, and one day he confronted me. For a moment I thought he might kill me.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “I don’t do that.”
Luckily he believed me and we all stayed good friends.
One night, just before we left town to workshop the show in Philadelphia, I exited the theater and started down the snow-covered sidewalk on Fourteenth Street when a tall, skinny guy came up to me and said, “Excuse me, do you have a dresser yet?”
I looked up—and up—and immediately recognized one of the tallest people I knew: Frank Adamo. A fairly recent acquaintance, he had recently lost his job as a junior ad executive at the J. Walter Thompson agency, and he was looking for something else, something different.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a dresser?”
I really didn’t know.
When I had done Girls Against the Boys the previous year I didn’t know that theater people did their own makeup. On the first night, I asked someone to point me toward the makeup room. They laughed and explained that I had to do it myself. That night, I borrowed makeup from some people and went out looking like Emmett Kelly the clown.
Frank smiled.
“Sure,” he said. “A dresser is the person who takes care of your wardrobe, makes sure it’s clean and hung up and ready for you every night. I’ll also do all the other things you will need done.”
“Oh, I see,” I said.
“I also need a job,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Well, you got one,” I said. “We’re opening at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia.”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“Then I’ll see you there.”
We shook hands, and the next time I saw Frank was in Philadelphia where he had my clothes hung up in my dressing room, as promised. Somehow he intuitively knew I was particular about my clothes. He also took care of everything else. He was so good, in fact, that he ended up staying with me for years, later serving as my secretary and stand-in on The Dick Van Dyke Show. And later still, he worked for Mary Tyler Moore.
Philadelphia was where the show came together and I got to know my talented castmates, and they were a brilliant lot, starting with Gower and my pal Chita. Then there was Paul Lynde. No one has ever played the part of Mr. MacAfee like him. My God, he was funny, just off-the-charts funny, but he was also very prickly. He made it known that he didn’t want anyone stepping on his lines, and God help those who did. He could be vicious.
Michael J. Pollard was a sweetheart, though on matinee days he went out between shows and got a little tipsy, and invariably, not long before the second show, I’d hear a knock on my dressing room door, and there would be Michael, his smile just a little off, his eyes glazed, wanting to know what was going on. I didn’t even have to ask. I knew that he was plastered.
I brewed him some coffee, threw him in the shower, and he was fine by showtime. If he wasn’t, I never knew the difference.
I was especially fond of my understudy, Charles Nelson Reilly. I hadn’t met anyone quite like him, but I took to him instantly. He was hysterically funny, clever, quick, and intelligent. I was never bored around him. On the first night of previews, it was raining and he came into my dressing room with a scarf around his head and purred, “Hello, my name is Eve Harrington. I’m such a fan of your work.”
He did the whole scene from All About Eve, which put me on the floor. He was one of a kind.
The truth is, I owed everything to Gower, who put me in the show and then gave me the benefit of his time, talent, and creative eye. I can’t tell you what he saw in me as a singer and dancer, but he saw something, and then he made the most of it, or rather enabled me to make the most of it. As a dancer, I was strictly an amateur. Yet he taught me tricks and moves that not only added to my ability and repertoire but also made me more comfortable, and that was key.
Singing was another matter. I could carry a tune. That much I’ll say. But I was not a good singer. Dick Gautier, who had the title role as Conrad Birdie, was the same way. Both of us learned that you can’t sing incorrectly eight times a week without getting hoarse. We had a scene where he came downstairs holding a beer and I said, “Hi, Conrad. How are you doing?” Between the two of us, we barely managed to eke out a sound.
It wasn’t really funny, but it was to us, and we laughed. Others weren’t as amused, though. Unbeknownst to me, during previews, the show’s producers didn’t think I was cutting it. I probably wasn’t; not then, anyway. They wanted to replace me, but Gower stepped in and asked for more time.
“Look, he’s going to be all right,” he said. “Let me work with him.”
He had an idea. He put the writers to work and overnight they came back with a revised version of the song “Put On a Happy Face,” which they had originally written for Chita. But Gower gave it to me, explaining, “The skinny kid doesn’t have anything to do in the first act. Give it to him.”
Of course, that song changed my life.
The show opened in New York at the Martin Beck Theater on April 14, 1960. I was a nervous wreck all day and into the evening before the show. I brought Margie and the kids into the city and we got adjoining rooms at the Algonquin Hotel. Despite my nervousness, the performance could not have gone better. We heard nothing but enthusiastic applause after each song and a long, foot-stomping ovation at the end.
It felt like a hit, and it was—even though the New York Times’ venerable critic Brooks Atkinson chided the show’s folksy simplicity and called some scenes “ludicrous.” But he praised Dick Gautier and Paul Lynde. My role puzzled him. “Mr. Van Dyke is a likeable comedian, who has India-rubber joints; and Miss Rivera is a flammable singer and gyroscopic dancer.” But, as he put it, our scenes “have little relevance to the main business of the evening.”
As a group of us read the review together in Sardi’s that night, we wondered if he had seen the same show we had performed. Apparently the critic had the same sense, too. “Last evening, the audience was beside itself with pleasure,” he wrote at the close of the piece. “This department was able to contain itself.”
A short time into the run, the production moved from the Martin Beck to the 54th Street Theater. By then I had grown comfortable in the part and was bringing much more to it than the New York Times’ critic had seen on opening night. I had also fallen into a nice daily routine. I went home after the show, then spent the next day relaxing until I went into the city, usually in time to have an early dinner at Sardi’s. I loved their cannelloni. On matinee days, I had it for both lunch and dinner.
During intermission one night, my wife called me. She was frantic. Our ten-year-old son, Chris, had run away and she couldn’t find him. She thought he had been kidnapped. I was distracted the whole second act; two-thirds of my brain was thinking about something else the whole time I was onstage. I raced home after the show and found police cars in the driveway and cops and bloodhounds searching through the woods behind our backyard.
They found Chris sound asleep under a tree, oblivious to the surrounding panic. It turned out that he’d had an argument with his younger brother, Barry, and my wife had sided with Barry, a decision that Chris thought was unfair. So he decided the hell with such injustice, and he ran into the woods.
From then on, I knew that boy was going to be a handful—and I turned out to be right. But he was always a good kid, and eventually he became a lawyer, a good one, too—the state district attorney in Salem, Oregon, in fact.
In some ways, those sorts of interruptions of the normal routine weren’t unusual. There was one night, for example, when I got caught in a blizzard on my drive into Manhattan and never made it to the theater. I had left home a little later than usual, after having an early dinner with Margie and the kids, and about halfway into the city, my Corvette ran into an enormous snowdrift. It was snowing hard, almost whiteout conditions, and the highway was no longer navigable.
I wasn’t the only one who got stuck, either. There were a few of us, and we got out of our cars, nodded and said hi, and started walking. I wasn’t that bundled up, and along with a couple of others, we thought we might freeze to death in the biting wind and snow.
We came to a restaurant, though, one of those diners right off the highway, and went inside. A bunch of other people had also taken shelter there. Making the show became moot. I spent the night in a booth, drinking coffee, talking, and waiting for the storm to let up.
The next morning, I caught a ride back home on a snowplow. The snow didn’t stop for days, and then it took a couple more before it began to melt. When I finally went back to get my Corvette, I found it in two pieces. A snowplow had come along and blindly cut it in half.
During one show, I looked out and recognized Fred Astaire out front, in the house seats. He was one of my idols. Imagine trying to dance in front of Fred Astaire. I had a long moment when I thought my so-called India-rubber legs might not only freeze mid-dance, but actually walk offstage on their own accord and refuse to go back on.
Another night we were told Cary Grant was in the house. I couldn’t see him during the performance, but afterward I was in my dressing room and there was a knock on the door. I opened it up, and there was Cary Grant. When I saw him, I prayed my eyes didn’t betray my surprise. Before I could think of what to say to him, he pushed me aside and started going through my closet. I wore my own suits in the show, some of which were tailored and quite handsome, and my assistant, Frank, had hung them neatly.
“These are very nice,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “Actually, I was given the After Six Award as the best-dressed on Broadway.”
“Well done, young man,” he said.
Years later, Cary asked me to do a movie with him, one of those Doris Day–type romantic comedies, and I declined. I don’t know what the hell was the matter with me. I could have worked with Cary Grant. Thank goodness I had better sense when Carl Reiner came to the show and offered me the role that changed my life.