“You better hire a good general manager,” my theater friends said, “because you don’t know what you’re doing.” So I hired Joe Harris. They all told me he was one of the best. I told him what I wanted to do, and he said, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” So I fired him. More balls than brains, but listen—he wanted to go the conventional tryout route, Boston or Philly, and I wanted to open in a big old movie house off-Broadway. I thought it would save money. If it worked, we would move uptown quickly with sets and costumes already made to fit a Broadway stage.
Well, it worked. We saved a million dollars. I’d like to think it worked exclusively because it was a great show, but it was definitely helped to success because Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis showed up on the third night. When our press agent, Jeffrey Richards, received a call that she was coming, he arranged to have cameramen there. “Don’t bother her,” I told Jeff, but he was smarter. We got a shot of her under the theater marquee, which of course had the word “whorehouse” in it, and it was a press bonanza. After that we were golden. The carriage trade, rank-and-file theatergoers, and anyone who was anyone wanted to see the show. If you wished to be up on your cocktail conversation, you had to have seen TBLWIT. We were a hit.
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Many producers put up their own money and come to opening night with their friends. Having done nothing but provide financial backing, they all rush up to the stage to collect their Tony Awards in June. They’re known as checkbooks. I want to be a creative intelligence, a voice in all the choices that are made in production, casting, script changes, and so on. I like to negotiate all my own deals with everyone involved in a show, and I’m willing to hang in with the dry cleaner week after week. Trust me, there’s more than one reason he’s called “dry,” but he and the others who service a show are a good part of what producing is all about—watching the expenses, making sure the set floor is mopped, keeping the crew happy. Bottom line: TBLWIT paid back in three months. That may be a record. I’m not a checkbook.
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Tommy Tune is terriffic—brilliant and smart and charming and fun. He’s a great entertainer, and he knows how to make things entertaining. I loved his work from the first moment I saw it in Buffalo in a show called Sunset. So I met him for lunch with his agent and told him I would make him a rich man. I was moved to say that when I saw he was wearing pants held at the waist with an oversize safety pin. I didn’t know if it was a fashion statement or simply that he couldn’t afford pants that fit his six-feet-six frame. The show needed better musical staging than Pete Masterson, a fine actors’ director, had offered at the Actors Studio, and, for me, TT was the answer. I hired him first, and told Masterson, King, and Hall after. That was doing things backward, and they could have refused but they didn’t. It was Tommy’s first directing job on Broadway, and he shared the credit with Pete, who was as gracious about it as anyone could be. Tommy, who got a percentage of the box office, did get rich. They all did.
It was my first time casting—and it was so much fun. In the late seventies there were no reality shows like American Idol and all its imitators, and so the process of talent elimination seemed unique to me. Hundreds of talented actors read the ad in Backstage, and it seemed like thousands showed up to strut their stuff. From the masses we would cull a chorus of eight men and eight women. The creative team and I auditioned them forty at a time. First they danced. That usually eliminated at least thirty out of the forty. The remaining ones sang. That usually got rid of another five. Anyone left got to read.
When casting was over we had “whores” who were each individual, and guys who looked like college football players.
Casting stories are legend. Here’s my favorite: After a run of a few years, every show develops a revolving door. Actors move on, and our show was no different. It seemed like we were always advertising for new “whores.” Many of the women we saw felt obliged to do a striptease for us. This was never asked for. One of the girls, however, found a way to go beyond even that: After she’d taken off all her clothes, she took out her teeth.
Rehearsals can be hell. I would sit in the orchestra watching the musical take shape, there only to give my support and encouragement, and to keep the lines of communication open between my authors, who fought with each other over everything, starting with “Good morning,” which was never good when they were hungover.
Once you decide on your creative team, you have to let them do their thing. But as it turned out, I didn’t always like their thing. Tommy and the three authors devised a big production number called “Two Blocks from the Capital.” The underlying message was that around the corner from our seat of government anyone can buy whatever diversion or perversion he wants. The point was valid, it was a good song; the lyrics were funny and right on the money, and the cast member performing it was terrific. But in my opinion the staging was way too edgy. Chorus girls feigning sex onstage with animals and tickling each other’s asses with feathers just didn’t work for me. I couldn’t imagine inviting the Universal top brass to see it without total embarrassment, without risking my future. It had to go. My creative team was most unhappy, especially Tommy Tune, whose brainchild this had been. They stood together against me, but I would not be moved. I called an end to rehearsals until they agreed to dump the song. “Go home,” I told them. “Rehearsal is over until the number is gone.” No one was willing to risk the entire production. The number was gone. I felt vindicated.
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Okay, unions. I think they’re both important and necessary, but—and here comes my big butt—they caused me problems, expensive ones.
1. When we moved from off-Broadway to the big time, I had to pay for the set to be “repainted.” This involves neither paint nor brush. The union (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) simply stamps the set “approved.” IATSE’s seal of approval cost us $400,000.
2. The show happily ran off-Broadway for six weeks with four stagehands. When we transferred uptown, we needed fifteen men to run it. Same show, same set, nothing had changed. The good news is that the union guys were never again short a hand for the backstage poker game.
3. We had a nine-piece band onstage. On Broadway, however, we paid the AFM for twenty-five musicians, and we paid it for almost five years. Some of the guys we paid were retired and living in Arizona, and some were playing their trombones in heaven. We never once laid eyes on them. But that was the agreement the union had with the Forty-sixth Street Theater, and I had to be good with it until we moved to a smaller house, the Eugene O’Neill, where its contract called for only fifteen musicians. The union muscled me, saying, You’ll pay what you always paid. Big mistake. I fought them and won. But it got nasty. Not one other producer stood at my side in the grim battle, so when I was not able to turn my victory into a precedent to benefit all of them, I shed no tears.
We couldn’t use the word “whorehouse” in newspapers or on TV. No way could we persuade the venerable New York Times to take our ads for important preopening publicity, and we needed those badly. What to do? We did the only thing we could: We went topless: No media marquee. It was a first, and the press we got out of the story made up for the loss of our “good” name. For the TV market we showed a big production number with lots of boots, cowboy hats, dancing, and singing; and the message was, Y’all come down and have a foot-stompin’ good time!
The Times finally relented, and so did the other media in New York, but the name was always an issue wherever the show traveled. My favorite moment came when I submitted a list of potential ads to the agency that makes the ad buy for the MTA buses that span the city. From a long list of possibilities—all rejected—they finally agreed to put banners along the sides of the buses that read: “Come to the Whorehouse.” Whoopee! The hierarchy of St. Patrick’s Cathedral that had just annihilated us in the press had to stand outside the church watching the buses pass by.
We had a first national touring company, a second national touring company, a bus-and-truck company—all the accruals of success. Our brand was known nationwide. We were a megahit. Universal had no problem deciding to make the film, and spared no expense attendant upon doing so. They exercised their cheap option, and we were in preproduction. That’s what I’d given the studio in return for immediate financing. Back then the authors were jubilant that they could go to work on the show immediately, and they would not have been able to do so without our giving Universal the option. But now they were stuck with it, and I was stuck with their change in attitude. There was a chill in the air. They weren’t going to earn the millions the authors of A Chorus Line had. Of course they did not have the credentials the authors of that show enjoyed. They felt cheated and angry. But I make no apologies. I had fought hard for our deal and had gotten them as much as I could, probably a little more than the usual because I’d been an agent who’d made these kinds of deals in the past. So I knew what was doable and always practiced what that mighty Texan Lyndon Johnson, quoting Otto von Bismarck, called “the art of the possible.”
Best of all, I was able to tie everyone, including Tommy Tune as director and myself as producer, to the movie—unheard of then at studios, which almost never ever encumber themselves with a show’s talent. The creators of the show then negotiated their own deals for working on the movie, and they were all paid extremely well. I was busy congratulating myself while the creative team was busy sticking pins in my doll. It didn’t matter. I loved the authors, and I loved the show. Nothing and no one could stop me from moving ahead, except Universal. They did.