Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (14 page)

After Jane had fallen asleep on the couch, Dennis and I gathered all the balloons and headed on up to the roof of the apartment. Standing on the ledge overlooking Astor Place, we ceremoniously released each of them into the cloudless night sky. Several hours had passed since they’d been injected with helium, so they were all pretty damn limp. We watched as they slowly drifted one by one onto the streets below, where they were generally ignored by most of the early-morning revelers. As luck would have it, though, our favorite neighborhood bum turned up just in time to catch the last two. After deflating them and ripping them both apart to carefully check for hidden booty, he tossed the colorful remains aside and crossed the street to investigate a more promising-looking trash bin.

“I guess this is just another one of those magical New York moments we’ll remember all our lives” observed Dennis.

And he was right.

Sunday’s press brunch was held appropriately enough at the restaurant Mildred Pierce on West 46th Street. This was my first experience with the paparazzi—the place was teeming with photographers and reporters, all of them behaving quite civilly when Dennis and I arrived. Truth be told, they were all noticeably bored, since our star had yet to make her appearance, and there wasn’t much Betty Lee could say about the rest of us that would have made much of an impression on any of them. John and Lillie were taking up the slack, and I heard a lot of questions about “oil wells” and “cattle ranches”—which I knew was not a topic our director and as-yet-undisclosed producer was at all comfortable talking about.

When she finally did make her entrance, Eve more than made up for the wait she’d imposed on us all. She was spectacular in her white satin turban (the first of many she’d be modeling for us in the weeks to come), and was warmer, more charismatic, and more open than ever before. Of course, I’d never really seen her in this sort of arena before, and I’d probably underestimated her enormous public appeal. The press people were now so wildly attentive I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d all fallen into line and welcomed her back to Broadway with some eponymous Jerry Herman-style chorus number.

Her exuberance was infectious, and I was easily able to kid around with her this afternoon. While the two of us stood hugging each other for a photograph, somebody pinched my butt.

“Did you just goose me?” I asked, still smiling for the camera.

“Why, no!” she said. “You were goosed?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well nobody goosed
me,
” she pouted. “Here, trade places with me!”

And so we did, like ham actors. It was great being silly with her. Just
great
.

It was about this time that one of the photographers decided it would be fun to have Mara revisit her role as Christina Crawford. He handed her a Joan Crawford doll (the restaurant came equipped with replicas of all the characters from
Mildred Pierce
, including one of Eve as “Ida”) and instructed her to abuse it in a number of inventive ways. “Punch it in the stomach!” he suggested. “That’s good!”
Click.
“Now smash it against the bar! That’s it! ‘No wire hangers, ever!’ Perfect!”
Click. Click. Click
.

“I don’t know how you feel,” said June, who had joined us to watch this spectacle. “But if I had a kid, I would never put her in the business. It’s awful—they sacrifice being kids.”

“Does Joan’s head come off? Yeah? Great! Okay, why don’t you strangle it first—that’s good, yeah—keep strangling, strangling, good. Now twist the head right off that sucker! ‘Atta girl!”
Click.

“My friend René Auberjonois let his six-year-old son make the decision for himself,” continued June. “And he chose to stay a kid.”

“Hey, Miss Gable!” called the photographer. “Can we get a reaction shot from you while Mara stabs Joan Crawford with a butter knife?”

“Whattaya gonna do?” shrugged June as she left us to do her shoot.

“Personally,” Eve confided as we watched June throw back her arms and contort her face in horror as Mara butchered the doll, “I’m glad Mara’s mother doesn’t share June’s conviction.”

Eve and I parted company soon after this to take our seats at separate tables; Eve was assigned the “Eve Arden,” and I joined Dennis, Scott, Lisa, and the costume designer John Sullivan at the “Butterfly McQueen.” There was yet another empty space set aside for Nick at this table—it was matinee day for
The Dining Room
, so once again we’d be missing his company.

“I bet he doesn’t even exist,” grumbled Dennis.

“Well, then, you’d better start learning Nelson’s lines,” I said.

Since John Sullivan was sharing our table, the “Butterfly McQueens” were the first group to inspect his portfolio of costume designs. Most of them were serviceable; one or two were better than that, verging on good. But unlike Marj’s work, John’s lacked any sense of fun or whimsy. I particularly objected to the skimpy cocktail dress he’d sketched out for June. Snooks was trashy, crude, and a whole lot more, but she wasn’t a slut. That’s not where I wanted to go with her, anyway, and I was fairly certain John (Roach) would agree. But I decided to save my critique until I’d had a chance to see June model the fully realized design.

Note to all newbie playwrights: if a costume doesn’t fit what you have in mind for one of your characters, don’t wait until after all the patterns have been cut and all the hemlines have been sewn before finally saying so.

The one truly inspirational outfit in John’s collection was the floor-length evening gown he’d created for Nurse Dagmar, which featured a heart-shaped cutout in the back. This one was a real show stopper, and Lisa understandably touted this fact to all those less fortunate with their own costumes.

Nobody lingered over lunch. The group was quick to disperse once the photographers had gotten some final “homecoming” shots of Eve and a few more outlandish pictures of Mara committing brutal and unnatural acts on the Joan Crawford doll. God only knew when or where these photos would be printed, but that hardly mattered right now. There had been enough parties for the time being, and we were all eager to get down to business.

And because Eve and I had finally managed to break the ice, I could tell we’d be having one damn fine grapefruit tomorrow morning.

The Minskoff rehearsal complex took up 14,000 square feet in the Astor Plaza building on Broadway between West 44th and 45th streets. Its third-floor studios (two of which we’d rented for
Moose Murders
) were in continuous use for rehearsals and auditions for Broadway shows right up until a 150 percent rent increase forced the owners to shut it down in 1989. Our main room faced the New York Times building on 44th Street, and we often imagined Frank Rich sitting there with his binoculars, à la Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s
Rear Window
, spying on our every move. At the beginning, at least, we were happy to keep the blinds wide open.

Anthony Newley was in the studio right next door to ours, working on his musical
Chaplin
, for which he’d written the book, music, and lyrics. Unlike
Moose Murders, Chaplin
never made it to Broadway—Newley had the presence of mind to cancel those plans after a loss of four million dollars on the road, and an opening to lousy reviews in Los Angeles. I’m delighted to report that
Moose Murders
never lost a dime on “developmental productions.”

“This is a black comedy,” said John when the cast had settled down with their coffee and fruit juice that first morning. He then elaborated on his decision to embrace what he referred to as
selective realism:
“The blackness is in the lines—you don’t have to go crazy to reinforce it.”

Almost everybody listened to this advice—for the first readthrough, anyway. Seated on a stool and with the script securely in her hands, Eve was confident and commanding, leaving no doubt that she was the focal point of the show. As she had instructed, I’d converted most of her dialogue to zippy one-liners, and she fired them all off effortlessly. The whole thing seemed positively tailor-made for her, probably because it
had
been.

June stayed uncustomarily low-keyed throughout the reading, apparently doing her best to follow John’s instructions. She was so subdued, in fact, that a comment she made during a break caught me off guard.

“My friend Alice Drummond,” she said, “thinks Snooks should be a platinum blonde with black roots trying to be Joey Heatherton.”

I told her I’d envisioned Snooks as a brunette, and a little
frumpier
.

“Oh, yeah?,” she said, with far less intrigue than surprise. “Did you see the design for my costume?”

She had an excellent point, and once again I made a mental note to have a chat with the costume designer.

So many things to do.

Nick Hormann turned out to be a true gentleman, with an unassuming, amicable demeanor and a resonate, soothing voice. I knew even then that his was the sketchiest role I’d created, most likely because the plot of
Moose Murders
(and yes, there
was
one; be still) hinged on keeping Nelson’s intimate and Machiavellian relationship with three of the female characters a great big secret. I knew I wanted him to be an
enigma
, but I hadn’t really thought things out beyond that. This laziness on my part as a writer may explain, if not make any less shallow or condonable, the only remark about Nick I made in my journal after that first rehearsal: “big nose.”

June, incidentally, had noticed more than Nick’s nose, as she confessed to me days later.

“Don’t you just want to take the zipper on his pants in your teeth,” she said, “and slowly pull it down over that great big bulge?”

June often made me feel and react like a Catholic schoolboy.

Lillie was one of the very few not to follow her husband’s advice for the readthrough. As the wife of the director, I imagine she thought she had a lot to prove that morning. That gave her an affinity with Lauraine, Hedda’s continually ridiculed and marginalized eldest daughter. The resulting overly zealous and painfully tenacious interpretation was strangely effective.

John’s blocking that first week also surprised me favorably. Although too static for my taste in Act One, it became far more involved and imaginative in Act Two. When I asked him about his approach, he told me he liked to begin with clear pictures in his mind of where he wanted each of the characters to end up logistically. He then wanted the actors to feel free to assist in getting to these locations, or “set-ups.” That way the play would become a “shared event.”

This sounded somewhat
gestalt
to me, but I also thought it might just be a smart way to handle this kind of black comedy. And we certainly had a group of actors willing to share their ideas.

My favorite of which that first week was Nurse Dagmar.

Lisa had an inexhaustible supply of stage bits, and I was convinced that her future reputation for this role would be nothing less than iconic. One day she would walk up to Nelson, plant her hand on a chair for support, and then nonchalantly hoist her leg around his neck, never once breaking her concentration. Another day she’d crawl out from behind the “bar” (represented by masking tape at this point) with a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth. She would belch ever so elegantly in Joe Buffalo Dance’s face. She would stand directly behind the diminutive Don Potter as Howie while he confessed to some illicit hanky-panky, vicariously reliving the details herself and mouthing the words “Do it, do it.”

I truly believe that Lisa’s infectious sense of fun and playfulness helped Miss Arden loosen up and relax into her own role.

I remember one time in particular when Eve affectionately patted Lisa on her behind after successfully abating one of Dagmar’s chronic screaming fits. Lisa, not to be outdone, glanced down at her butt and then said to Eve in a very earnest and sultry voice: “
Thank
you.”

The littlest Holloways acted like well-behaved children this first week. Mara came in already having every single one of her lines down cold and, when not on stage, she would quietly sit off to the side being homeschooled by her mother. Scott continued to be unafraid to maul and pet Eve whether or not the script called for it. At first, Eve would train her eyes on John as if to say “you
will
be putting a stop to this soon, won’t you?” But it wasn’t long before she warmed up to both Scott and his molestations. Outside of rehearsal, Scott kept to himself for the most part, seeking out only Eve during breaks to pump her for more Tales from Hollywood. And don’t let my sarcasm fool you, here. Throughout the week Eve and I remained only distantly cordial. I just knew Scott was getting the scoop on a lot more folks than Benay fuckin’
Venuta
, and I was insanely jealous.