All About “All About Eve” (43 page)

Feeling pressure to make Duane a shade more effeminate, Lewis decided to give them what they seemed to want. One day at rehearsal, when Bacall said, “Bring him along,” Lewis swished. “I camped it up,” he recalls, “and they all laughed hysterically. I suddenly realized I had made a terrible mistake.”

Lewis had played the stereotype too well. In a sense, he emasculated the character—and himself. At that moment the powers that be spotted a cliché portrayal that would grab a cheap laugh. If it had been a movie they would have yelled, “Cut! Print it.”

Instead, there were “long conversations,” as Lewis puts it. He won’t specify who said what, but the upshot was, “That’s how Duane’s got to be; he has to be nellier.” Lewis was immensely uncomfortable. “I got crazy,” he says. “I thought, I don’t want to do this!” He turned it over to his agent, who held discussions. The issue couldn’t be resolved, there were hard feelings, and Garrett Lewis quit the show.

It would be a mistake to assume that Lewis’s departure was in protest at the offensive depiction of a gay character. His decision was personal, not political. He left the show because he wanted to maintain his straight-arrow image in order to continue working in movies. Then as now, Hollywood got the jitters over actors who were perceived as gay—unless they would settle for prissy Franklin Pangborn roles.

“I didn’t want to play a character who was instantly recognizable to the audience as gay,” Lewis says. “That’s the way I live my life, but it’s certainly not something I flaunt. Besides, it’s a very different world in California from the Broadway stage, and the West Coast was where I wanted to work.”

Another person who was there at the time tells a radically different story. According to that source, “Garrett Lewis was
replaced
. The problem was that he was extremely good-looking, like a
GQ
model. Len Cariou, the leading man, lacked traditional leading-man handsomeness. The original casting didn’t work right because the second male lead, played by Garrett, was stunning and Cariou wasn’t. The humor just wasn’t right.”

The anonymous source betrays no maliciousness in recounting this. Indeed, the person is still indignant at the way Garrett Lewis was dismissed: “He was given his notice at the New Year’s Eve party, just about like this: ‘Happy New Year, you’re fired.’”

Lee Roy Reams, who had auditioned for the role of Duane Fox but had lost to Lewis, was called in a short time later. He has a lot to say about
Applause,
but first a flash-forward to the subsequent careers of Garrett Lewis.

As it turned out, Lewis didn’t continue for long in front of the cameras. By the time he appeared in
Funny Lady
in 1975, musicals were rare and other genres didn’t interest him as much. Just then a friend of his, agent Sue Mengers, bought Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house in Bel Air. Mengers and her husband liked the way Lewis had done his own home, so they asked him to redesign their new acquisition. Mengers said, “If it’s good—and it had better be—you’ll get lots of business. I’ve got the biggest mouth in Hollywood.”

First Lewis removed the lemon-yellow shag carpet that Zsa Zsa had put down in abundance, along with her waterfall in the den. When the house was stripped to its bones he designed new carpets, new furniture, and tailored the place to the pleasure of its new chatelaine.

Garrett Lewis’s second career was under way. Word of mouth from Mengers led to commissions from Barbra Streisand, Barry Diller, Herbert Ross, and many others. Then, in the late seventies when Ross was directing
The Turning Point
, he called Lewis in to decorate a couple of the sets.

A bit later Ross called again. He was at work on
California Suite
and not entirely pleased with some of the art direction. Lewis became a visual consultant on that picture. Career number three took off. As set decorator—“That means I do everything but the walls”—Garrett Lewis has received four Academy Award nominations, for
Beaches, Glory, Hook
, and
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
.

*   *   *

Singer-dancer-actor Lee Roy Reams, raised in Kentucky, came to New York in the mid-sixties. He appeared in
Sweet Charity
, a Lincoln Center revival of
Oklahoma!,
and on television he danced on all the variety shows.

When Garrett Lewis left
Applause
, Reams stepped in to play Duane Fox. Shortly after Margo invites Duane to escort her and Eve on the town and to “bring him along” (i.e., his date), there’s a scene in a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Reams describes Ron Field’s original concept: “We walked into the bar and there was the date I was meeting. Margo, Eve, and I went up to him. Then he and I kissed, a little peck, not a big deal. It seemed perfectly natural to all of us.

“Then, during tryouts in Baltimore, when we did the gay-bar scene there was a
gasp
from the audience because two men had done a little kiss like you might give your father, for God’s sake. It actually cast a pall; the show didn’t play well that night.

“Next day we came into rehearsal and Ron said, ‘Lee Roy—and I said, ‘Don’t tell me—you want to cut the kiss.’ And we did. Ron replaced it with a hug.”

Reams adds that Comden and Green had originally intended his character to be not only gay but black. “They were aware of the shortage of roles for black actors, and that’s one reason they considered making Duane Fox African-American,” he says. But the idea was dropped. Perhaps a double-barreled minority character struck the producers as too volatile. A same-sex interracial date might have caused a riot in Baltimore, and elsewhere.

Reams, a quick study and a polished pro, soon absorbed the shock of Garrett Lewis’s departure. Now the cast seemed permanent: Bacall, Cariou, Reams, Brandon Maggart as the playwright Buzz Richards and Ann Williams as Karen, his wife. Diane McAfee, a twenty-one-year-old singer and dancer, was Eve Harrington. Another young performer, the energetic Bonnie Franklin, along with her fellow chorus gypsies, performed the show’s title song as though it were the first show-stopping number in theatre history.

A second major change would soon cause another shock, but not until after the gypsy run-through.

Lauren Bacall had never been to a gypsy run-through before. In fact, she claims she didn’t know what one was. But she liked the
Applause
gypsies—“the kids in the dance corps,” as she calls them.

Here is Bacall’s take on a gypsy run-through: “You do the show—no costumes or sets or orchestra, only a piano—in a theatre filled with the casts and gypsies from other shows running on Broadway.”

Ron Field had scheduled the gypsy run-through of
Applause
on the Sunday before the cast left for Baltimore. Bacall remembers the nerves and the exuberance: “The date was January 18, 1970, the place the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. I was dressed in slacks and turtleneck sweater. The theatre started to fill up. There was no curtain. The actors were shaking in the wings, the gypsies warming up way upstage in corners, using pipes as barres.

“Finally it was time. Ron, as is customary, walked downstage to explain the set, time, and place. As I heard ‘Margo Channing’ I made my first entrance. The applause was tumultuous. With no sets or costumes, the audience must use its imagination. They’re privy to a new birth, the first unveiling of a creation. At the last curtain call the stage became flooded with every musical director, producer, writer I’d known—and actors, all bursting with enthusiasm.”

Diane McAfee, playing Eve, recalls the gypsy run-through for its “wonderful screaming acceptance that was so overblown.”

Lee Roy Reams remembers Bacall in the wings that day, waiting to go on, and her hands shaking quite visibly. “I clasped her hands in mine. I said, ‘My career’s on the line today as well as yours.’ She laughed. We did not let go of one another’s hands until the announcer said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Margo Channing.’”

Reams felt sure after that performance that the show would be a hit, the main reason being its star. “She had this walk, and this voice, and that tossing of the hair—and it had nothing to do with Bette Davis,” he says. “Besides that, she wears clothes like nobody else.”

The first night in Baltimore, Lauren Bacall and Len Cariou, at the start of a flourishing romance, walked out of the theatre en route to a nightcap. They glanced at the marquee and did a double take. Their names were up in lights, but his was misspelled: “Ben Cariou.”

Guys Like Us, We Had It Made

The most famous song by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams was not sung by Lauren Bacall or anyone else in a Broadway show. It’s a tune almost as familiar as “Happy Birthday,” yet of the millions who know it, few could name the composer or lyricist. It was made popular in the early 1970s by Archie and Edith Bunker, for it’s the theme song of
All in the Family
.

According to Strouse, the Bunker music came about because he and Norman Lear, producer of
All in the Family
, became friends while working on
The Night They Raided Minsky’s
. Strouse composed the music for that film, and Lear was co-writer. A little later, Lear showed Strouse several
All in the Family
scripts, and asked him and Adams to write a song. Strouse doubted that such controversial material would make it to television.

The number of people hearing the Strouse–Adams theme song in any broadcast of the sitcom was vastly greater than the number who have heard all their show music in every performance since their first collaboration, including the ubiquitous “Tomorrow,” from their 1977 hit,
Annie
.

The Baltimore reviews of
Applause
were lukewarm. Lee Roy Reams recalls one notice that summed up the show as “a lot of homo ho-hum.” The cast was depressed, the producers verged on panic. They had eight weeks ahead to improve—or else. “The pressure was constant,” Bacall remembers. “Rehearse all day—scenes, songs, dances; performance at night; drinks at the hotel, sleep, breakfast, and start all over again.”

A couple of weeks after the Baltimore opening Ron Field went to Bacall’s dressing room before the Saturday matinee. He looked dour. Bacall guessed that the rumors were true: A cast member was to be replaced.

“Don’t you think it’s that out-of-town panic?” she asked. “The minute something isn’t quite right, an actor is fired.”

Field asked, “Do you like Diane?”

“Yes, I do,” Bacall answered.

He said, “But you shouldn’t; that’s the problem. As Eve Harrington, she should present a threat to you. That’s why the show isn’t working the way it should. She doesn’t come across as all those things Eve Harrington must be.”

Sometime later Brandon Maggart, who played Buzz Richards in the show, knocked on Diane’s dressing-room door. He said, “I have to tell you something.”

She looked at him with sympathy. From his tone of voice, he must have gotten bad news.

“What’s the worst news you can think of?” Brandon asked.

Diane gasped. “You got fired!”

He paused. Suspense built; he didn’t answer. He might have been playing a climactic scene onstage. But the drama was real. Diane ran to Brandon and embraced him, for in recent weeks they had started to fall in love. “Brandon, I can’t believe it! You got fired.”

The pause ended. “No,” he said. “You did.”

It was probably the worst shock of Diane McAfee’s young life. She could only stammer, “Why?”

Ron Field, Charles Strouse, and Lee Adams all gave her the same reason: “You’re too young and rosy to scare Margo Channing, especially Lauren Bacall’s Margo Channing.”

According to McAfee, Ron Field felt so terrible about replacing her in the Broadway
Applause
that he immediately hired her to play Eve Harrington in the show’s bus-and-truck tour. Specifying the difference between the national tour and the one she did, McAfee explains: “The national is the A-class tour—the one that Lauren Bacall eventually took on the road. That one tends to stay longer in each place, and they fly you to it. The bus-and-truck tour, on the other hand, is exactly what it sounds like. You give one or two performances and you travel by bus. My contract at least stipulated that I got a double seat. I bought beads at Kmart for that seat, and a little plant to hang in the window, and a wine rack for the overhead luggage bin.”

For ten months the bus rolled across the Midwest, to Arizona and New Mexico, up and down the coast of California. The various bus-and-truck Margo Channings included Patrice Munsel and Alexis Smith.

When her tour ended, Diane McAfee returned to New York and lived for many years with Brandon Maggart. They have two daughters, the youngest of whom is the singer and songwriter Fiona Apple.

Three decades later, Diane McAfee betrays no bitterness. She says, “It’s nice to dream that I might have had a glamorous career, but perhaps that would have precluded my having children. And that I can’t imagine. Yes, it’s hard finding the right direction for my life right now, because there’s nothing I really like to do except perform. I tried about five years ago to go back into musicals, but I discovered a different world. It wasn’t the theatre I had left.”

*   *   *

The Saturday after Ron Field told Bacall that Diane McAfee was to be replaced, he came to Bacall’s dressing room again. The matinee was ready to start; why was the director’s gaze pinned to the floor? When Bacall asked what the hell was eating him, Field intoned: “Just look in the fourth row center this afternoon. You’ll see Gower Champion sitting there.”

“So what?” replied the puzzled leading lady.

“So I’m being replaced,” he muttered.

“What?” Bacall screamed. “Over my dead body!”

Gower Champion, sometime star of Hollywood musicals, was now a theatrical éminence grise, for he had gained a reputation as a doctor of shows ailing in tryouts. To Bacall, he might have been Doctor Death. If ever there was a perfect moment for a fasten-your-seat-belts scene, this was it. And Bacall was magnificent. If the critics could have seen her backstage!

“Come to my hotel after the performance,” she ordered Field. Margo Channing, at that matinee, flamed with added fire and music.