All About “All About Eve” (42 page)

During the summer of 1969, Comden and Green completed two rewrites of the show, in which they developed their own characters. By the second rewrite, these characters—including Margo Channing, Bill Sampson, and Eve Harrington—had evolved rather far from those of the Orr story as well as from those in
All About Eve
. For example, the Margo of
Applause
started her career in the movies and then moved to Broadway, à la Lauren Bacall. Among a host of other changes, the character of Addison DeWitt was split into two unequal parts: that of the producer, Howard Benedict (played by Robert Mandan), and the smaller part of a cheap Broadway columnist, Stan Harding (played by Ray Becker).

Suddenly, in a late-summer beau geste, Fox granted full rights to the movie script, possibly because Lauren Bacall had been officially announced as the star. She had just signed a run-of-the-play contract for ten thousand dollars a week. By then, however, the creative team of
Applause
had solved most of its problems and no longer required studio largesse. “Actually, we used very little of the movie script,” said Adolph Green. In the published version there are roughly a dozen lines taken verbatim from
All About Eve
.

The decision to incorporate less rather than more of the Mankiewicz screenplay was made in view of artistic demands, as Comden and Green later explained: “
All About Eve
is made up of almost two-and-a-half hours of brilliant dialogue and situations which had to be adapted into a show that could contain no more than an hour-and-a-quarter of dialogue to allow for at least an equal amount of music and dance—and which could emerge on its own with a new and vital identity. And of course the film had to be metamorphosed into musical theatre that would be less ‘all about Eve’ and more ‘all about Margo.’”

At the outset, Comden and Green had been reluctant to take the assignment, the main reason being that in all their successful years together they had never done
only
the book to a musical. They had always written the lyrics as well. But Strouse the composer and Adams the lyricist had already completed much of the score by the time Comden and Green were hired.

It was a difficult decision. Not only were they unable, initially, to use the Mankiewicz script, they were also reluctant to tamper with a classic movie that so many people knew almost by heart. A further disadvantage was not being asked to write the lyrics and, in Betty Comden’s words, “Sometimes when you work with an old friend things don’t turn out well.” The old friend was Lauren Bacall.

Bacall had met Comden and Green years earlier in Hollywood. The three became close friends, and Bacall says she was as nervous about working together as they were. Despite her hesitation, however, Charles Strouse recalls that she was the one who demanded Comden and Green. Betty Comden herself, when asked “Was it Lauren Bacall who suggested to the producers that they bring in you and Adolph Green to write a new book?” answered elliptically, “I’ve heard that.”

If Bacall engineered Sidney Michaels’ replacement, she surely had sound artistic reasons for doing so. She also had too much at stake professionally to go after any talent but the best, friendship or no. Comden and Green must have struck her as the best possible team for
Applause
, since they had written the scripts for such popular backstage satires as
The Barkleys of Broadway
(1949),
Singin’ in the Rain
(1952), and
The Band Wagon
(1953). Highly regarded by both Broadway and Hollywood, Comden and Green commanded more fame, prestige, and box-office draw than Strouse and Adams. More, in fact, than anyone in the show except Bacall herself.

As it turned out, working together placed no strain on the friendship. Comden says, “This was a perfectly professional relationship all the way. In other words, the work was the work and if we saw each other for dinner, that was a separate thing. There was no running to talk to her without consulting the director. We were the authors, she was the star, and everything went through the director, as it should. We came out of it close friends. I have happy memories of that show.” When the libretto was published in 1971, Comden and Green dedicated it to Bacall.

Reading that libretto now, it’s easy to find fault. Inevitably, the greatest temptation is to criticize it for what it isn’t; and it isn’t
All About Eve
. Rather, it reads like a paraphrase of Mankiewicz, minus censorship. In place of his psychological insight, his shrewd view of why fulfillment in the theatre is, for many, worth all the risks, Comden and Green supply mainly a PR notion of life on the stage. In their libretto even the suffering and betrayal are whittled down to rueful one-liners. A typical example of psychology replaced by shtick is this exchange from Scene Two of
Applause
:

MARGO

That line reminds me,
and
the audience, I’m playing someone considerably younger than myself.

BILL

You’re sick, Margo.

MARGO

No—I’m forty.

In places, the libretto evokes an early-seventies sitcom: Margo to Bill as he leaves for Rome: “Hey, don’t eat too much pasta. I want to be able to get my arms around you when you come back.”

On the other hand, a libretto is not intended to stand alone. It’s one piece of machinery in the vast spectacle of a musical show. Looked at from another angle, the Comden and Green libretto is the foundation of a stylish edifice constructed to encase the talents of Lauren Bacall and a number of other show people. Their work wasn’t intended to compete with
All About Eve
. It was written as a deft variation on the Mankiewicz theme.

Aaron Frankel, who taught workshops in musical-theatre writing at the New School for Social Research in New York, describes the process of musical adaptations: “It is necessary to move
completely
from one medium with its conditions to another with very different conditions. The spirit of the source material is what must be cleaved to, and the letter forsaken. The aim of an adaptation is to exist as a clearly new experience.”

The new experience in question started to rev up early in November of 1969. There was a reading of
Applause
at Ron Field’s home on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, with actors, authors, and composers present. This meeting was of course full of excitement and promise. It was also politely tentative and, for a gathering of show people, somewhat reserved. Bacall explains why: “This was the first meeting of actors who were going to work together for a long time to come. Along with the others, I was quite self-conscious at first, then I had to rise above who and what the rest of the company thought I was. The main problem for me was that they all came in with their minds made up.”

By the end of the evening, however, those present felt that the ice was broken. The general impression among younger cast members was that Bacall wasn’t expecting star treatment. In Ron Field’s living room she seemed more like Brooklyn’s Betty Perske (her real name) than Hollywood’s Lauren Bacall. After the read-through, Field served drinks, and by the end of the evening the consensus was that
Applause
was off to a good start.

The following week the cast went into formal rehearsal for two months. Bacall had started voice lessons in September. These continued. She also enrolled in a gym, and took dance classes with Ron Field’s assistant, Tommy Rolla.

Although Bacall had always wanted to do a musical, when the time came she was scared. And understandably so, because she had never sung or danced professionally. She was also forty-five years old and had made only a handful of films since Bogart’s death in 1957. No one would come right out and say it, but Lauren Bacall had evolved into a legendary bystander. She was the most famous widow in Hollywood.

Back in New York, her hometown, she had done two earlier plays.
Goodbye Charlie
opened in 1959 and lasted for only 109 performances.
Cactus Flower
, which opened in 1965, was a hit. Bacall played it for two years.

The lead in
Applause
, however, was bigger than anything yet. It could turn her into a new kind of star. Or finish her off. Later, in her book
Now
, she put into words the emotions she felt at the time.

The Margo Channing of
Applause
and myself were ideally suited. She was approaching middle age; so was I. She was insecure; so was I. She was being forced to face the fact that her career would have to move into another phase as younger women came along to play younger parts; so was I. And she constantly felt that the man she was in love with was going to go off with someone else, of course someone younger, and I, too, had had those feelings. So Margo and I had a great deal in common.

Bacall was actually in a deeper crisis than Margo Channing. Margo, a star in great demand, must learn to act her age, onstage and off. She must also battle a younger rival while trying to calm her paranoiac fears that Bill is about to desert her. Bacall, on the other hand, wasn’t getting any film offers, she had just divorced Jason Robards after an eight-year marriage, and her mother’s recent death had left her devastated. She had every reason to work harder than she had ever worked before. If
Applause
didn’t work, Lauren Bacall might soon be the name of a Hollywood remnant.

Facing the challenge and the risks of the show, she bulldozed ahead with a gutsy pronouncement that might have come from a Bogart-Bacall movie: “I’ve made an ass of myself before.”

The first day of rehearsal started off with the press. Reporters and photographers milled around. Ron Field and Bacall performed a couple of dance steps from Margo’s big number. Flashbulbs and questions: “How do you feel about doing a musical, Miss Bacall?” Then the press left and hard work began.

Len Cariou played Bill Sampson. In the play Bill is eight years younger than Margo; in reality Cariou was fifteen years junior to Bacall. Born in Canada in 1939, he had acted primarily at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario and at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis before making his Broadway debut in
The House of Atreus
in 1968. As a newcomer to the New York stage, Cariou of course had much to gain from
Applause
. Musically he had an advantage, since he possessed a smooth, creamy singing voice that recalled Gordon MacRae’s. The fortuitous romance that blazed up between Cariou and Bacall during tryouts in Baltimore also proved an aesthetic asset onstage. Like Bette Davis and Gary Merrill twenty years earlier,
this
Margo and Bill saw to it that life imitated art.

In the process of translating
All About Eve
to the stage and updating it for the 1969–70 Broadway season, Comden and Green gave Birdie Coonan, the Thelma Ritter character, a sex change. In
Applause
Birdie is replaced by Duane Fox, Margo’s hairdresser and confidant.

Ron Field spotted an actor in the movie
Star!
who he thought might be just the one to play Duane. The actor was tall, handsome Garrett Lewis. In the 1968 picture, starring Julie Andrews as Gertrude Lawrence, Lewis played actor-producer-director Jack Buchanan, one of Lawrence’s colleagues in the London theatre. Lewis seemed to have it all: looks, a singing voice, experience as a dancer, and a Broadway résumé that included
My Fair Lady
and
Hello, Dolly
.

In Los Angeles, Garrett Lewis got a call from his agent asking him to fly to New York to audition for
Applause
. “I talked with Ron for a long time about the show,” Lewis recalls. “He had a particular interpretation in mind for the role of Duane. The character was a gay guy but Ron said, ‘I don’t want him to come across as a gay stereotype. For once, if there’s a homosexual onstage I’d like him
not
to be effeminate.’”

When Garrett Lewis auditioned for the part of Duane Fox in the fall of 1969, homosexuality was just officially out of the closet, even in New York. The Stonewall riots had erupted a few months earlier, in June. Up to then, even the most “advanced” portrayals of gays on stage and screen were largely stereotypical, as in
The Boys in the Band
. So the character of Duane Fox as written by Comden and Green, and as envisioned by Ron Field, was a departure from the usual stock portrayals.

“It was tricky for males in show business at that time,” Garrett Lewis says. “And being a dancer certainly had an onus. I had built up a nonstereotypical image in my work, and I wasn’t interested in ruining it. The part of Duane seemed ‘safe,’ so I took it.”

Lewis signed a run-of-the-play contract. He flew back to Los Angeles to pack, then moved into a big apartment in Manhattan expecting to be there for a while. “I had heard horror stories about Lauren Bacall,” he laughs, “but I didn’t experience anything like that.”

At rehearsals, Lewis seemed to stick out because of his height. He’s six foot three. The first time Bacall saw him she exclaimed, “My God, he’s so
big!
” He towered over Len Cariou, who said at the audition, “I don’t know if I can be on the same stage with him.”

After several weeks of rehearsals, Lewis and his agent felt that some of those connected with the show—Comden and Green, or perhaps Strouse and Adams, or maybe the producers—wanted more of a certain kind of humor in his portrayal of Duane Fox. Lewis also perceived a certain dissatisfaction with the fact that he and Cariou were, in a sense, both leading men. It was all very unspecific, according to Lewis, but someone seemed to want a more recognizably homosexual interpretation of Duane, Margo’s hairdresser. Was Garrett Lewis too butch? The question hovered at every rehearsal, unasked and unanswered.

In Act I, Scene Two, shortly after the initial encounter of Margo and Eve, Margo asks Duane to escort her and her new friend out on the town. “I’ve got a date,” he says. “Bring him along,” says Margo, which is the libretto’s only explicit reference to Duane’s homosexuality. Margo’s matter-of-fact line—and Bacall’s delivery of it—were commendably nonstereotypical. Indeed,
Applause
was a minor landmark as the first Broadway musical to present a gay character as having a viable sexual identity. Previously such characters were written and played as fops and fairies.