I went into show business. Why not? Everybody said, “You can never call yourself a writer until you’ve written a musical that never gets produced.” Anyhow, it looked more interesting than politics, which had turned into accounting.
In less time than it takes to say, “There’s no business like show business,” I was in conference. We were all in conference. The composer brought music. The lyricist brought words for the music. The producer brought his powerful critical judgment, and I brought a script that would never get produced.
We conferred for a year or two. It was exhilarating. I could understand why all the old theater professionals say, “There’s no business like show business.” We conferred and drank coffee and threw away the script and dreamed of pulling a coup to make My Fair Lady and Grease look like financial trifles.
Now and then great directors, paladins of the Great White Way, men so eminent one scarce dared shake their hands without permission, would come by, grant us a smile, then a scowl, then a sneer, then stalk out in swirling capes, and we would order coffee and confer.
“Buck up!” the composer always cried. A composer of infinite ingenuity and relentless optimism, he would go back to the keyboard and produce melody more beautiful than he had ever produced before.
“There’s no business like show business,” the lyricist would tell me, and recharge her nimble wit to produce lyrics not dependent on rhyming “moon” with “June.”
Over the coffee I dreamed of millions. In the theater, people talk of millions the way the Pentagon talks of billions. Just one more script and that island in the Aegean would be mine for the buying. I wrote another script.
This one would never get produced either, as it turned out, nor the next one, nor the one after that, but we were getting there. No longer were we doing a musical about a paraplegic cabdriver who falls in love with a tollbooth collector at the Lincoln Tunnel. Somehow, inexorably, because there’s no business like show business, the musical had turned into the story of a fast-food-chain heiress who falls in love with a Marine corporal during the Boxer Rebellion.
One day a great director emerged during coffee in a swirl of cape. He had a Mephistophelean smile and beard to match. We all conferred. The director loved it, but of course it was all wrong. The script needed “a lot of work.” So did the music. So did the lyrics.
“There’s no business like show business,” he explained, while proving indisputably that the show was really about an aristocratic Roman girl, illegitimate daughter of Augustus Caesar, who falls in love with Attila the Hun and sires the House of Romanov, which later ruled Imperial Russia.
At this point, the producer became eligible for Social Security and retired. It was the first sensible act any of us had committed.
When I proposed to follow his example, the composer and lyricist and director cornered me behind a cup of coffee and said, “There’s no business like show business.”
Indeed there isn’t. In what other business is it possible to labor three years to earn a total of $90 while spending $465 for coffee? It was no surprise, then, that a second producer emerged from a Rolls-Royce. He loved the show. He even paid for the coffee. It was cloud nine, except for the script, which had to be rewritten to turn it into the story of Abraham Lincoln’s granddaughter falling in love with John L. Lewis and inspiring him to found the United Mine Workers of America.
There being no business like show business, the producer canceled the coffee after discovering another show he liked even better. “Come now,” the director said, happening upon me as I was about to leap from the Brooklyn Bridge, “there’s no business like show business.”
What was this we saw before us? Yet another producer? Yes, yes. Now there would be whole urns of coffee. Back to the keyboard went the composer, back to the solstice moon for the lyricist, back to the Plotto Board for the craver of island property in the Aegean.
Who could possibly balk at changing the script again? Of course what the world was waiting for was a musical about a Chicago flower girl who falls in love with Marconi and inspires him to invent radio. Why hadn’t we seen it all along?
Orgies of dramaturgical rewriting! A ringing telephone. Will I take a cut in pay, like a good chap?
But I am receiving no pay to be cut—in fact, have earned nothing since three years ago, when somebody paid me $90. “But of course,” the telephone explained. “There’s no business like show business.”