Jack in the box, p.7
Jack in the Box, page 7
A serious associateship depends on many things: a shared vision, a similar vocabulary, a sense of humor above all, and finally the rudiments that apply to all degrees of friendship, for that’s the end of the field where they eventually find themselves. A prospective associate will need to feel sufficiently surprised by the mentor to hang in there, even when it’s rocky, or when the mentor becomes a genuine pain in the ass. There comes that inevitable moment when all associates are shocked to discover, despite all the positives, that they are fundamentally Not Wanted on the Voyage. I once sat fuming for hours in a car outside a hospital while Ellis Rabb and Rosemary Harris were visiting an ailing Christopher Plummer in the early days of the APA-Phoenix Repertory, trying in vain to tempt him into joining Ellis’s company. Left alone and in the car? Why wasn’t I invited along? I would be so helpful. I could supply any number of needed references; I could support myriad subjects in the wink of an eye; I was, in all other ways, so clearly part of the “family,” but here, when it came to stepping up professionally, it appeared too early. During these beginning months of my apprenticeship with Ellis, he had gone off for a few weeks’ vacation with friends while I remained at home, meant to keep an eye on the productions, communicate with one and all, reassure the company and the management that even though Ellis might be absent, something of his methodology was still afloat. “Will you tell the company I’m to give notes?” I inquired as I was helping him pack for his vacation. “No,” came the abrupt reply. “Why not?” I persisted. His answer was as inscrutable as it was terse: “When you’re ready to give notes, you’ll know … and so will they.”
It made me wild. One of those sops you toss to an acolyte to illustrate just how far they are from qualifying, and it did nothing to assuage me, or steer me in my desired direction. But, of course, he was right, and the moment finally did come, sitting among the company over drinks during his absence, one evening in Ann Arbor after a somewhat rocky performance. One of the mystified actresses turned to me and said directly, “Well, you were watching! What do you think was wrong?” There it was, the invitation Ellis had intuited! And off I went … thrilled when, later that night, she sent me a message that said: “Your notes are arrows to the heart of clouds.” It was fairly obviously the drinks talking, but it was all the encouragement I needed.
As one who has benefitted so obviously from this kind of education, I have very strong feelings about the nature of support. An “assistant” is an observer, someone designed to sit, be quiet, watch, get coffee, and keep his or her own counsel. Not every assistant is destined to be an associate, and social skills, or family ties, or even a charming smile and an attractive demeanor are not qualifications enough for being asked to step up as an associate, whose fundamental purpose is to substitute in every conceivable way for the absent director. An assistant has no valid opinion of consequence when facing off opposite a stage manager, or dramaturge, or even a coach. An associate, in my estimation, can and does give notes with the authority of the original creator, and, when necessary, has the insight and chops to alter cues, change entrances, even replace a wig, if it comes to that. I confess a director can’t always tell which candidate can and can’t best handle this kind of power, but a genuine associate knows intuitively, and that makes all the difference. An assistant is damned lucky to be there. An associate is worthy of being paid and substantially supported by the producer. That is the very important difference.
5
The Jew on Broadway
The decidedly mixed blessing of star power
Visiting Jerry’s dressing room in Las Vegas. Photo signed by Jerry Lewis, 1995
1.
I have always heard Jerry Lewis was something of an asshole. Well, egomaniacal, that’s certain, and a soi-disant auteur, worshipped in France and indulged in his own country. A kind of naïf genius responsible for more inventions in film than are usually acknowledged, no question, but difficult? You bet!
People say a lot of things about exceptional people, because in my experience, exceptional people don’t adhere often to the usual expectations of how regular folks believe one is meant to behave. They can be short, they can be rude, they can be insufferable. What they are, however, is clearly exceptional in some crucial or individual way, and if so, and if they are dependable, you end up supporting them. (Equally true, however: if they prove not to be special, you never make that mistake again.) Mike Nichols confessed to me that he was simply awful in general at one point in his life when he had been hooked on dicey self-medication, and prey to paranoia and all sorts of insecurities. He was nothing but generous and gracious to me in the years we were friends, and I knew nothing of the earlier years, but many sets of brows in certain circles still elevate in a cautious way whenever his name is raised. And he’s been gone for a few years now …
So Jerry? I have to believe it, because so many people confirm it. But I have to say I had the most amazing relationship with him during our common period of exploration, when he took over the role of Applegate in my revival of Damn Yankees, and toured the country with it for over a year. Our meeting was itself something out of the ordinary, on a day I find hard to forget for many reasons.
The circumstances couldn’t have been more ridiculous. My production of Damn Yankees had begun at the Globe (see chapter 3), and in the 1994 season, made a very healthy transfer to the Marquis Theatre on Broadway. The reviews were excellent, business was good, and with an eye to a possible national tour, the producers had made the somewhat bizarre suggestion of replacing Victor Garber, who was due to leave after a year anyway, with none other than Jerry Lewis, who could play a few of those slender final winter months in New York, where his clout might well fire the doldrums that occur annually after the Christmas holiday rush, and bridge the gap before the production would be ready to tour in March or April.
What do you say to such a suggestion? Had Mr. Lewis ever been onstage in any legitimate production on or near Broadway? No. Was he known to “replace” another star in any other vehicle? No. Did he have the chops to sustain the punishing load of eight performances a week? Who knew?
Sure! Hell, let’s give it a shot! Right?
Wouldn’t you?
The day in question was exceptional already, since I was in a basement of Lincoln Center, below the Beaumont Theater, with none other than Tom Stoppard, rehearsing his densely plotted spy play Hapgood, starring Stockard Channing. The rehearsals were intense, to say the least, and yet there was one day and one day only when Jerry Lewis planned to be in New York, and there was nothing for it but to schedule a first meeting with him around the restricted rehearsal hours for Hapgood. Lunch, it was decided, was the answer. I would take my lunch break up in the conference room off the lobby of the Beaumont, where Jerry Lewis, his representatives, and our management would all gather with the best possible intentions to see if we might not be able to accommodate the Great Man in a national tour, after he’d briefly made his Broadway debut, of course. An audition, would you say? Perhaps, but I felt intuitively it was I who would be auditioning.
The meeting was going to be, by necessity, tricky as well as brief, as I had only the one lunch hour available, and would someone with the reputation of Jerry Lewis understand that his director could spare him only the inside of sixty minutes? Hard to say …
All plays take immense concentration and involvement, and it’s fair to say a Stoppard play might be expected to be particularly taxing, especially with the gifted and exacting playwright in attendance. But at precisely five minutes after twelve on this weekday, I found myself in the small, extremely slow elevator that was to take me from the basement up four floors to the lobby, where my appointment was already in progress. I was struggling to lift my mind from the morass of twinning and quantum physics, including how I intended to stage the abstruse opening pantomime of the play, when the elevator door opened, revealing before me, in the conference room just off the lobby, a long table with something like twelve or thirteen people sitting around it, all staring at the end, where none other than Jerry Lewis was clearly holding forth. Everyone with the exception of Jerry seemed to be dressed in sepulchral black, as for a funeral, and all were obviously paying rapt attention to the monologue in progress. As I entered the room, no one so much as looked up at me, and I glanced to my right, where I saw a table with plates and cutlery wrapped in paper napkins next to various bowls of fruit and salads and rolls. I stood for a moment to see if I might be introduced, if not invited in, but Jerry, in the midst of a full-tilt performance, barely stopped for a breath. So I quietly took a plate, heaped a few spoonfuls of tuna salad onto it, and, spying the only vacant chair, to Jerry’s immediate left, moved around the table to occupy it. As I circled the table, I could identify at least one friendly face, that of Charlotte Wilcox, our company manager, who gave me a grim little nervous smirk as I passed. She seemed preoccupied.
Still, no eye contact, or even acknowledgment, from our star, so I sat down to his left and, with an eye on the clock, began eating my lunch. Jerry was explaining to the assembled the major problem of this proposition, as he perceived it, and the need to share it with everyone. “You see,” he was continuing, “I sit at my dressing table, and in the mirror before me, there sits this nine-year-old kid staring back at me. Now, I don’t have any intention to go out on that stage … but the kid does, see what I mean? And, the deal is, I’m responsible for him … you aren’t! He looks at me in the mirror, and he thinks I know what the fuck I’m doing, so when they call places, it’s that kid who gets up and goes out onstage, not me. I stay in the dressing room, waiting for him to finish onstage and come back in. And if it doesn’t go right … if things aren’t to his liking, when he does come back, it’s not you who are going to have to face him … it’s me! And you wouldn’t believe what he puts me through!”
Thoughtfully relishing my tuna salad, I’m thinking, Oh, Christ! How in hell is this gonna work?, trying to catch one or two sets of eyes around the table, but all are staring intently at Jerry, for all I know, fairly terrified at what they’ve just heard. He goes on. There’s more about “Jerry,” the nine-year-old kid, of course, a lot more, and I think we’re now probably all thinking more or less the same thing, but I’m pretty sure no one from the William Morris Agency, or our producers, is going to ask how this is going to sort out … like, do we now need two contracts, one with Mr. Lewis and another with nine-year-old Jerry, the kid? He, utterly at ease and not touching a morsel of the food before him, is dressed in his chosen uniform of a white open-necked shirt, black slacks, and a cashmere argyle sweater in brilliant red, white, and black, and is heading for the homestretch now, pretty much on fire, while laying out his methodology, his concerns, his process for all to consider. He’s on a roll, relishing his silent, captive audience, and eventually I look at my watch and realize I’m going to have to get up in about five or ten minutes and get back down to my cozy world of quantum physics and the abstruse reckonings of Tom Stoppard. Other than the clear fact that the star sitting to my right seems to have a preteen doppelgänger he insists represents him onstage, I don’t know a goddamn thing more about how this impossible experience is bound to evolve than when I entered.
So, taking advantage of a moment when Mr. Lewis pauses to sip a little from his Diet Coke, I push myself back from the table and, picking up my plate, hear myself saying, “I’m really sorry, everyone, but I’m afraid I’m due back in rehearsal in a few minutes … Mr. Lewis, can I ask you a question?” He turns to me for the first time, an enormous smile spreading across his face. “Sure!” he says magnanimously. “Go ahead—anything!”
I gather all my courage and, standing with the remnants of my lunch, say, “I just wondered if you plan to bring your own writers to this experience, you know? To write special material for the show?” He visibly pales. “Jesus, no!” he says, now looking me fully in the face. “Didn’t I make that clear? I love this script! I fucking love everything about it! I wouldn’t change one goddamn word of it, I promise you. That’s why I wanted to do it in the first place. It’s brilliant, just as it is!” I’m not sure what I expected his answer to be, but this wasn’t remotely it. We stared at each other for a moment, and then I decided to play my advantage. “Swell!” I said, extending my hand to shake his. “That’s really all I need to hear, I guess.” And moving back from the table toward the door, I continued, “Thanks a lot for coming, Mr. Lewis. I’m really looking forward to this. And next time you see Jerry, give him my best, will you?”
I recall a whoosh of breath from the stunned choir around me. Jerry pauses for just the tiniest moment, his eyes widening, and then bursts out laughing. As if on cue, so do all the relieved toadies present, and, nodding and smiling to our producers, I deposit my empty plate near the door and, with a wave, head for the elevator.
I just made Jerry Lewis laugh! Imagine that! I took a chance, God knows how or why, and he bought it. It looked to me as if we might be just fine.
2.
And damned if we weren’t!
I found myself in a rehearsal room several weeks later with an ebullient, almost maniacal Jerry, who had arrived with “coach” in tow, having drilled every single word into his brain before so much as a rehearsal was to begin. He was word-perfect, and deliriously proud of the fact. He could spew out a particular scene or speech with almost a schoolboy’s exaggerated precision, and, completing it, would tear around the rehearsal room, virtually dancing and cheering for himself with glee. It was as astonishing as it was infectious, and the rehearsals proceeded apace.
My choreographer happened to be none other than Rob Marshall, the very last time he was to serve as choreographer to anyone, as he was on his swift rise to subsequent film success with the likes of Chicago and Into the Woods. We had a terrific rapport, and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience; my joy in collaborating with choreographers and designers has been nearly compensation enough throughout my entire career, and the list speaks for itself: Graciela Daniele, Jerry Mitchell, Danny Mefford, Josh Bergasse, George Faison, and Justin Peck, on the dance end, and Douglas Schmidt, David Rockwell, John Lee Beatty, Bob Crowley, Santo Loquasto, among others, doing the sets. Costumers like Ann Roth, Jane Greenwood, and Catherine Zuber … just imagine it. Even when the results have proved in any way disappointing, the initial process of creation has inevitably been reward enough for me.
One afternoon during the early technical rehearsals for getting Jerry into the show, Rob and I arrived together after lunch in the orchestra of the Marquis Theatre to find Jerry onstage, hurling a red cane up into the flies. We were about to stage “Those Were the Good Old Days,” a true vaudeville number right up his proverbial alley, and there he was, with one or two members of the ensemble, clowning around for them, as he loved to do. Jerry was almost never “off” in the years we were friends. He felt this genuine compulsion to give you “Jerry,” whether you’d paid for it or not. It was exhausting, truly, but at this time in his life he was happy, consequently pretty much unstoppable, and, in fairness to him, almost always spot-on. So with a few of the ensemble kids cheering him, he was flinging this red enameled cane—a walking stick, really, with the requisite white-tipped end—high up into the flies, and waiting below until he could catch it effortlessly as it hurtled down, often behind his back! To be honest, neither Rob nor I had ever seen its like. It was, to be sure, more of his endless vaudeville vocabulary, cadged over decades of continual entertaining, his gifts and skills, some of them no longer relevant to the kind of personal appearances he now regularly made, more a talent belonging to his early training. We sat openmouthed in the orchestra until he spotted us and, swiveling around, began to ramp up his demonstration accordingly. “Jerry,” I called out, “what on earth are you doing?” As the red glowing stick came crashing down, he caught it effortlessly, twirling it around with “I can do this shit all day!” his only gleeful response.
I looked over at Rob. “We’ve got to use this somehow, don’t you think?” I asked. With a wink, Rob said, “I’m sure that’s pretty much the point, aren’t you?”
3.
Sometimes, most times, depending on the chemistry, you get lucky. That’s about it. If you are aware, free, riding the goodwill of the early stages of creativity, and alert for the possibilities, sometimes you just get plain lucky, because something you didn’t plan on, perhaps didn’t even know about, suddenly appears before you, and if your own ego doesn’t get in the way and mess it all up, you seize the moment, and everything changes. That was the effect of that damned red cane. Whether deliberately or just on a whim, Jerry was generously showing us something he had in his back pocket … something that was not required, and perhaps didn’t qualify. He had mastered the almost lost art of flinging an object out of sight and, like a skilled juggler, effortlessly catching it, no matter where it descended. How often is someone called upon to do that? Rob and I subsequently took “Those Were the Good Old Days,” a nostalgic and highly comic lyric about the devil’s proudest disasters, and opened it up for Jerry to be, for just a moment, pure “Jerry,” the “Jerry” all audiences were hoping to see. We couldn’t realize the value at that moment, but Jerry’s determination to honor the musical form by doing precisely and exactly what we had written and created for the character could also be momentarily mitigated by a “turn” that was both authentic and delightful and yet did not detract from the total picture but rather added immensely to it. We had “our” part of the show done the way we required, but he could have “his,” as well … a carved-out portion of the entertainment when he could simply let loose.
And boy, did he! While we continued to stage the number, he’d toss his cane up into the flies, one, two, three times, and then bounce it off the floor and back into his hands while going for the big finish.
