I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life (7 page)

Kurt shrank from his six foot three inches to about five feet nine inches in front of our eyes. He was almost in tears. Unable to speak, he backed off of the stage, a beaten man.

A half hour later there were six of us sipping coffee with Kurt, and we were all upset and angry. Herman Wouk, the author of
Marjorie Morningstar
,
The Caine Mutiny
, and other great works, tried to console Kurt with “It happens to us all,” relating in detail the number of intellectual beatings he had lived through. It did not help. This attack was so wrong, so evil, not in keeping with Kurt’s world.

It was a number of months before Kurt got up the courage to go onstage again with his chalk and blackboard. When he did get back his courage, he made many speeches before all kinds of audiences. The agent scheduling the speeches knew that Kurt could charge more for his speaking engagements, but after some increases Kurt resisted, and though he could have been paid more, he said that it wasn’t worth that much to listen to him.

3.
Kurt and the Theatre

The New Lafayette Theatre

Before I met and got involved with Kurt, although he would have approved of what I was doing without reservation, I stumbled into the theatre business and was given an opportunity to go to and represent the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Annie and I were thrilled. After all the work we had done to improve race relations in Nebraska, this was another opportunity to contribute to something we believed in very strongly.

But at this time in Harlem, in New York City in the sixties, it was not safe to wander around or even show your face in Harlem if you were white. So we went to see theatre at the New Lafayette but we were always greeted as we got out of the cab on 137th Street, and we were not let out of sight until we departed in a cab they made sure we got into. My friendly clients would follow me to the men’s room to make sure I was safe.

The New Lafayette consisted of Ed Bullins, author, Bobby Macbeth, director, Whitman Mayo, actor (Grady on the
Redd Foxx
TV show), Sonny Jim Gaines, actor and author, and a host of other talent. This was community theatre as it should be. If you had two dollars you paid and got in, and if you only had one dollar you got in, and if you didn’t have the buck you got in for nothing. The cast and crew, all black, were paid next to nothing, but they did it all, the sets, the costumes, the acting, direction, and the ushering and box office, and they loved what they did. Loving it, they did it well.

About this same time I started getting involved in black theatre in a lot of ways. I organized AMAS for Rosette Le Noire, a black musical not-for-profit theatre group that made a name and has survived. I did a lot of work for Ed Bullins, one of the foremost black authors of that era. Ed wrote a lot of plays and was produced all over the place, at La MaMa, the New Lafayette, the American Place Theatre, and at theatres throughout the world. In 1972 Lincoln Center produced Bullins’
The Duplex
. Bullins was unhappy with the directors’ (Jules Irving and Gilbert Moses) emphases and accused them of turning his play into a “coon show.” He was so angry he put on a sandwich board and paraded around in front of the theatre in defiance. I didn’t know what to advise him, except that it would do little good to protest. And it did little good to protest.

During this time we became friendly with Jeree Palmer, who was the token black in the New Christy Minstrels. She was singing with the New Christy Minstrels and in cabarets, and she was sometimes the opening act for Jerry Lewis, Bill Cosby, and Alan King when they did club shows. She appeared on television in daytime serials and Bob Hope specials, and one day she decided she had gone about as far as she could go in that area.

Miss Palmer, who had graduated from Manhattan Community College and studied at City College, enrolled at Brown, where she received a degree in theatre arts. She conceived a show that was to become
Shades of Harlem
, which ran for close to two hundred performances at the Village Gate.

Jeree married Adam Wade in 1989, and they have been performing together and producing another musical play. Adam Wade (born Patrick Henry Wade, March 17, 1935) is an American singer, drummer, and television actor. He is noted for his stint as the host of the 1975 CBS game show
Musical Chairs
, which made him the first African American game show host. He starred in the production
Guys and Dolls
in 1978 and hosted the talk show
Mid-Morning LA
.

Jeree and Adam are happily married and living in New Jersey.

The Fantasticks

The story of
The Fantasticks
and how it affected our lives is really fantastic. There are so many unbelievable parts of the story that one must suspend disbelief to accept some of the story. The little musical play ran for forty-two years at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York City. Opening night there were seven daily newspapers in the metropolitan area. We got clobbered, bombed by six, and our only rave review was written by a critic so drunk we threw him and his drunken girlfriend out at the end of the first act because they were disturbing the audience. I helped him out and into a cab, and he needed help. The dailies were not good but we got some raves from the weekly and monthly mags. But without the
New York Times
, it is one helluva job staying alive.

Want more? Opening night was a disaster in a lot of ways. We went to the ad agency of Blaine Thompson, who did 98 percent of the theatre ad work and got the reviews, raced to the home of Ed Wittstein, where there was a party (a crying session) in progress. Word Baker, the director, read the reviews amid the crying, and Harvey Sabinson, the most prestigious press agent of the time, put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Don, do Lore [the producer] a favor and tell him to close the show.” Of course we ran forty-two years at the Sullivan Street Playhouse and are still running in New York City on Broadway at 50th Street at the Snapple Theater. Every year after the opening night we had an anniversary party, and every year George Curley, who played the Indian in the original production, would remind Harvey what he said opening night, and every year, year after year, Harvey denied he said it. But he said it.

Want more? Before the show opened we were busy celebrating a birthday at a little party in Riverdale when I get a call from Lore about ten forty-five that night telling me that I have to get to the theatre immediately, the fire department says we can’t play because we have an extra seat in the theatre in violation of the fire laws. So we put together two carloads and race through a blinding rain, half-pickled, to get to the theatre and save the day, or in this case the night. Word Baker had this thing about doing midnight performances, and I had to get there so the show could go on.

We made it, and in my conciliatory fashion convinced the fire department to let us go on with the show since the show must go on in showbiz. When the curtain came down, Ira Kapp, the host of the party uptown, said he was so tired he slept through it, but feeling guilty said he was sorry that he did not get the chance to invest. To his then disappointment, I told him he could invest, and he and his business partner gave me the $330 for a 1 percent interest. To date, that investment, like all the rest in that amount, has paid off over $70,000, and Ira always says he should have given me the whole $330 himself.

Want more? Months before
The Fantasticks
entered our lives, this guy Noto called me and asked if I would represent him on a play he was producing. I had met him when I represented Bob Socol, who bought an advertising agency from Lore Noto. So I said yes. Didn’t know a thing about theatre law, and I muddled through the legal work and the opening of an Off-Broadway play entitled
The Failures
, which it was, starring Albert Salmi. A few months later I got another call from Lore, this time telling me I should get to the Minor Latham Playhouse at Barnard to see a run-through of a little musical called
Joy Comes to Deadhorse
.

Annie and I hurried to Barnard that night; for Annie it was a trip from the suburbs to a long-ago life since she was a Barnard grad. Susan Watson was supposed to sing the ingenue part, but since she had laryngitis, a guy by the name of Harvey Schmidt played the piano and sang the part both. Susan Watson shortly afterward became the star of
Bye Bye Birdie
and we lost her as a star of this little musical.

I guess there were several persons who wanted to produce this musical play, and Harvey, who wrote the music and was responsible for the wonderful script in the title, later told me the reason they went with Lore was that he came to the reading in a white suit with his attorney. I was the attorney.

Lore set about immediately making this one-act play into a two-act play, and the name was changed to
The Fantasticks
. I remember sitting around the apartment of Tom and Harvey with Harvey at the piano and suggestions coming from Jerry Orbach, Kenny Nelson, and Rita Gardner, but the additions were all Tom’s and Harvey’s.

Theatre Law?

What did I know about theatre law? Answer:
nothing
. I didn’t know there was such a thing, although I did muddle through the documents for
The Failures
. Now Bob Montgomery from the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind and I had to put together some real documents for this little musical. Bear in mind that when it came to theatre law, Bob Montgomery was an expert on Broadway and I was expert on nothing to do with theatre law. Together, over fifty years ago, Bob and I cobbled together some agreements that are used almost verbatim today for all Off-Broadway productions, with only minor changes.

So the play opened in May of 1960 and the summer was rough. The thing that saved us was the entertainment gang, the cast and crew in showbiz, all of whom loved the show. On some nights after opening during that summer, the only ones in the audience were a few people and the seven-year-old and nine-year-old who lived in the building and Annie and me. After eighty-two performances and a load of scotch each night starting at six thirty and ending at two thirty a.m. and driving home to Merrick, LI, pickled (except the one night we were too drunk and Tom Jones made us stay at his place on 74th Street in the city), it became obvious that if we were going to be in this theatre business, we would have to move to the city. It was just a question of time before I would wrap the car, with us in it, around a telephone pole.

The next weekend I went to the city, hocked my life insurance, and bought an apartment on 75th Street off Madison Avenue. That was over fifty years ago. We raised our children there and are still living there. When we bought the apartment, the Whitney Museum was just a hole in the ground and was built after we became city dwellers.

We loved
The Fantasticks
. In fact, obviously a lot of people must have loved it and still do. It played all over the world, and as I said, it is still running on 50th and Broadway in New York City.

Janice Mars

One of the people who saw
The Fantasticks
and wanted to promote it was Janice Mars. I debated with Janice, who was Janice Marks at Lincoln High School. When she came to New York and became Janice Mars, she also became friendly with Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, and Maureen Stapleton, who together financed the Baq Room, a dingy nightclub on Avenue of the Americas in the 50s in New York City. She was also a popular method chanteuse, as this hideaway was frequented into the late morning hours after the Broadway plays closed by her following, which was comprised of the New York cognoscenti, including Judy Holliday, Lauren Bacall, Richard Burton, Comden and Green, Noel Coward, and Marlon Brando, who had an affair with her that was at times indescribable in its intensity and fervor. But they remained friends forever, even after the lovemaking cooled. It was very dark in the Baq Room, but on any given night you could still make out the famous faces: Tennessee Williams, Judy Holliday, who brought Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Christopher Plummer, Lauren Bacall with Jason Robards, Maximilian Schell with his sister Maria, Anna Magnani, who was, Janice was later to say, the best audience she ever had, Curt Jurgens, and one time even Thornton Wilder.

We could write books about Janice and the night we were at her house and she threatened her husband with a carving knife. He escaped with his bodily parts intact. But since this is about
The Fantasticks
, what is important is that she got ahold of the music and was singing it nightly at the Baq Room to all these famous people. It helped the play.

The Fantasticks
meant more to me than just a diversion, it meant a whole new career. After the play opened, there was an influx of small Off-Broadway musicals, and I was asked to represent a number of them. Also straight plays were represented by me, including a play
The Sudden End of Anne Cinquefoil
, written by Dickie Hepburn, Katharine’s brother. We were attending opening nights two or three times each month.

That was when Annie was buying me a Gucci tie for every opening and fifteen dollars was a lot of money for her to be spending on a tie. Off-Broadway opening night parties in those days were not easy to imagine. They usually took place either in someone’s living room, someone’s playroom in the basement, on a crowded stage, or in someone’s dressing room. There were rarely enough seats, if any, so it meant balancing a plastic cup of wine in one hand and a paper plate full of pasta in the other hand. During the evening I splashed food or drink on my new Gucci. It happened so many times it was not fun. I came up with the obvious answer.

For openings after that, Annie started buying me Guccis, and later other label, bow ties. Then when I would slop on a piece of clothing, I was slopping on the washable shirt and not the uncleanable expensive Gucci tie. You may have noticed that if I am wearing a tie, which is almost always when I go out, it is a bow tie. So now you know why I wear bow ties. There is a reason for most things, and sometimes the reason may even make sense.