Broadway Tails (9 page)

I thought
The First
was a wonderful show but ahead of its time in the way it addressed discrimination. Audiences weren’t ready for it, not as part of a musical. The show closed after thirty-seven performances. I was thankful to work on
The First
for many reasons. First, it was another chance to work with Martin Charnin, my mentor. He gave me my start and the confidence that if I put my mind to it, I could do amazing things with animals. And it was another chance to rescue an animal from a shelter and give him a better life. Champ’s Broadway career may have been short, but he lived happily with me for many more years and did many more photo shoots.

Camelot
closed at the beginning of January 1982.
Annie
was in its sixth year on Broadway. I had the third and fourth national touring companies of
Annie
out and three Broadway credits to my name. But I decided I wanted to expand my business to do more television and movies, so I needed a New York address. I rented an apartment two doors down from the Alvin Theater on West 52nd Street. That’s where I established William Berloni Theatrical Animals. Going into the fall of 1982, I had high hopes for new shows and new projects.

Then I heard there was going to be a revival of
Alice in Wonderland
. It was being directed by one of the theater world’s most famous actresses, Eva Le Gallienne. She had produced, directed, and appeared in the original production in 1932, and now, fifty years later, she was directing and appearing in a production—at the age of eighty-three. From my research, I knew the production had both a pig and a cat in it, so I contacted the general managers to see if we could put a bid in on the show. They were pleased to hear from us; we went into negotiations and eventually got the job to provide the animals.

The show was slated to open in December, and we finalized the agreements on November 1. Because the show was a revival and was geared toward a children’s audience, they wanted to do as much publicity as possible. The public relations firm decided that they wanted to hold a pig audition in New York City, and they asked me to participate. I found it odd that we were actually going to be auditioning pigs when I had the contract to provide the pig, but their job was to get publicity, and if they had to stretch the truth a little bit, they said they didn’t mind.

At first I resisted. I didn’t want to lie to the public—I’ve never lied to the public. The PR firm kept insisting that if I didn’t participate in this pig audition, or supervise it, or at the very least
pretend
I was involved, I would be let go from the show. The audition was scheduled for the end of November, and they were going to invite people to come in with their pigs. My first thought was, not only was it untruthful, it would be dangerous because there were plenty of people out there who would show up in New York City with their large and small pigs. There was a stress factor for the animals, a safety factor for the humans, and a hygiene problem. I kept trying to explain that inviting the public was a risky thing. So I said, “Well, then, why don’t we stage it from beginning to end?” At that point it was either stage a pig audition or lose the show completely, and because I was trying to build my reputation as the only animal trainer on Broadway, I decided to do it.

In my research, I started looking for pig farmers and 4-H club members in the tri-state area who might be raising pigs in the middle of winter and might be willing to let us use one of their pigs. This was one of those times when going to a shelter wouldn’t be possible. There were a lot of farms in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, and all of them were raising pigs for slaughter. As we started calling around, a lot of farmers would laugh at us and hang up—nobody believed we were seriously looking for a baby pig to be trained for a Broadway show. Then I got in touch with the 4-H club of Hunterdon County, New Jersey. When I told them what we were doing, they were thrilled to participate because they had a bunch of kids who were raising piglets, and this would be a good opportunity for them to learn more about handling their animals.

I came up with the idea of creating a small, penlike area in the rehearsal studio where we were holding the audition. We got plywood and built a
1-foot-high barrier that was about 20 feet by 20 feet. We got the members of the 4-H club to come in—each owner would have a story about why he was auditioning his pig. The kids were going to pretend they didn’t know each other. But before we did that, I had to contact the City of New York because public health laws prohibit livestock from coming into the city unless they have health certificates. This was my first experience calling the city to get a permit for exhibition. We had to verify that all the piglets were vaccinated before we received a permit to do the exhibition.

The show was thrilled. We had eight contestants, and we knew that all the piglets were vaccinated and well cared for. The day came, and the publicity surrounding the event was outstanding. There was television, newspaper, and magazine coverage from all over the world. We held the audition, judged by Kate Burton, who was starring as Alice, Miss Le Gallienne, and me. The young pig who won the part was named Michelle, raised by eight-year-old Vanessa Bolbowlby. Vanessa’s family agreed that we could use her piglet for the show. The cameras clicked and the cameras rolled. Not only were we featured in the local papers, the story went out all around the world. They couldn’t have asked for a better publicity event to kick off the show in a very fun and light-hearted way. Before we even went into rehearsals we were heroes.

Now, the trouble with pigs is that when they’re first born they weigh about 6 or 7 pounds, but they grow rather quickly. By the time they’re a month old, they get to be about 30 pounds. That meant the piglet would not last too long because in the show Kate Burton had to be able to walk onstage with the piglet in her arms and say 30 seconds’ worth of dialogue; then she’d put the piglet down and it would run offstage. When we started with Michelle, the pig, she was only six days old, but by the time we got into rehearsal she was thirteen days old and growing fast.

The problem was how do we teach a pig to be carried out onstage and then come offstage in the same place every night, in front of an audience? When you pick up baby pigs they squeal. They do not like to be touched, they do not like to be held, they have a very low center of gravity, and so when you pick them up, they become very nervous. And the second part of it was, when we put the pig down, how would she know to come offstage to us?

Well, as we had this baby pig, we had to wean her from her mother, which meant that every four hours we had to bottle-feed her. She was living in our kitchen in New Jersey with the dogs, who thought she was the oddest creature you could imagine. Then we brought her into our apartment, which happened to be our new office on 52nd Street, across the street from the theater. Of course, when we signed our lease, it said we could have dogs. It didn’t say anything about having a pig, so we would sneak her into the apartment every day in a small dog carrier.

By watching her, I learned that—just like clockwork—Michelle got hungry every four hours and would start looking for us to feed her. Piglets are just little eating machines—because their bodies are growing so fast, they need lots of nutrition. The one thing that we could depend on was for her to always be hungry. As soon as I got her bottle ready and started to shake it, she would come running—nothing would stop her from getting that bottle.

Both the pig farmers and the vets said that we had to be careful to keep the bottle level when we fed her, because if you held it up too high, the liquid would go down into her lungs and she would drown. So when we gave her a bottle, we’d keep it level and allow her to suck about half of it down furiously. Then we would take it away from her to give her a chance to swallow, relax, and calm down. Then we would feed her the other half. Well, just like any other baby getting warm milk, once she had her bottle, she got a milk buzz—that warm, fuzzy feeling where she would just close her eyes halfway and digest her food a little bit. Then, in
a little while, she would sort of root around for more, and we’d give her the other half. Watching her, I thought we might just have a chance of doing both behaviors.

When we started rehearsing, we timed everything so that by eight o’clock each night, we’d be feeding her one of her bottles. In the wings, right before she went on, we would give her half the bottle. As soon as she finished half, we would hand her to Kate Burton, who would carry her out onstage. Michelle would go out quietly, sort of smacking her lips, eyes closed just long enough for Kate to be able to say her 30 seconds’ worth of dialogue. By then I had tied jingle bells to her bottle so that every time I fed her, I would shake the bells and she would come running. So right on cue, when Kate would finish her line, I would shake the jingle bells, and Michelle would wake up and run offstage for the rest of her bottle. It worked like a charm. We had found a way to train our little pig to do the behaviors that we needed just by observing what she was doing.

Now the script also called for a little black kitten, and that was much more difficult. Despite my success with getting a cat to jump onstage in
The First
, I still believed there was no such thing as a trained cat. In
The First
, Champ simply had to jump after a bit of food and then the curtain came down. Here, the cat would be onstage much longer—between the lights, the orchestra, and the audience, I was sure it would run away and hide. So, even though the script called for a kitten, I thought that if I could find a smaller black cat to do the role, that would give us a better chance of success. I visited the local shelters, looking at black cats, but most of them were either too active, too sick, or too old.

At the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals we found a tiny black cat that had been a stray. She was healthy, but she was a scaredy-cat. She hung back in her cage and didn’t move because she was overwhelmed by all of the goings-on at the shelter. When you opened the door she didn’t try to run away, she didn’t try to bite you—she just balled up smaller and tried to figure out a way to have you ignore her. When you picked her up, she would curl up in your arms and just sit there, very quiet. I thought this cat had a chance to work, so we adopted her. We named her Ophelia because we had changed our pig’s name to Hamletta, our little
acting pig. So now we had Hamletta and Ophelia, two great Shakespearean animal actors.

The show opened with Kate Burton and Ophelia sitting on a chair in a living room. When Kate began saying her lines, she would put Ophelia down on the chair. As she went through the looking glass, the chair would be pulled offstage. Just as I had hoped, Ophelia sat quietly with Kate on the chair. Then, when the chair began to move, she would curl into a ball and stay put. At the end of the play, when Alice returned from Wonderland, the chair would ride back out onstage with Ophelia on it. Without fail, both Hamletta and Ophelia performed their roles perfectly in the show.

Because the animals really needed to learn their behaviors onstage, we didn’t begin rehearsing until December with the rest of the cast. It was a wonderful cast. The first day, when we introduced Ophelia to Kate Burton, Kate promptly said, “I’m sorry, I can’t hold the cat. I’m allergic to cats.” At which point Eva Le Gallienne and our production stage manager turned to me and said, “Bill, what are you going to do about this?” I thought it was the oddest question I had ever heard. If someone’s allergic to an animal, there’s really nothing you can do to the animal to stop the allergy. I wondered why Kate hadn’t said anything before, knowing there was going to be a real cat in the show. But they put the onus on me to make this go away.