Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (4 page)

Eve was by no means the first person approached to play the scheming matriarch Hedda Holloway in
Moose Murders
. More than a year before she finally took the bait—back when we were shooting for a spring 1982 opening—the well-respected casting team of Geoff Johnson and Vinnie Liff (along with their associate, Andy Zerman) had presented us with a list of potential Heddas that included the likes of Alexis Smith, Nancy Marchand, Geraldine Page, Beatrice Arthur, Jean Stapleton, Katherine Helmond, and Zoe Caldwell. One way or another (mostly through submissions to agents and managers), we’d been chasing after all of these ladies ever since—without much success. Eve herself, incidentally, never appeared on this or any subsequent list prepared by Johnson, Liff, or Zerman.

I’d actually written the role with Sada Thompson in mind, envisioning a hybrid of her bitterly malicious mother in the Off-Broadway production of
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
and the wonderfully wise and nurturing mother she’d played in the mid-70s TV drama
Family
. Shortly before we acquired the services of Johnson-Liff, I had personally sent an unsolicited manuscript to Miss Thompson—something you’re never supposed to do if you have no name recognition yourself.

She gave me a call anyway.

She told me the play was “laugh-out-loud funny,” and that Hedda would be a “lark” to play.

“But the thing is,” she said, “I’m too chicken to do this.”

I asked her what parts of the script she found scary.

“No, it’s not that,” she said. “I don’t know anything about the director. I’ve asked around, and nobody’s been much help. I’ll probably end up kicking myself, but I’m just too much of a coward to take the risk.”

She didn’t ask me about
my
credits, which was lucky because I doubt that my two previous, month-long Off-Off-Broadway showcases and one slightly longer limited run Off Broadway would have made much of an impression. I discovered in the months to come that my track record as a playwright rarely became an issue for actors presented with a script already optioned for Broadway. Somebody with big bucks had more or less validated it
and
me, so, for now, anyway, I wasn’t that much of a liability.

Despite her apprehension about working with an unknown director, Sada didn’t flatly turn down the possibility of doing the show, and asked me to keep her informed about its progress. Encouraged by this little ray of hope (and by the fact that she’d bothered to give me a call in the first place), I put a script in the mail to Anne Meara, who had seen and enjoyed my play
My Great Dead Sister
—a “coming-of-age” comic drama that had just about nothing in common with
Moose Murders
.

I knew Anne could easily take on the lead role of Hedda, but I thought she was much better suited to play the potty-mouthed Snooks Keene—a two-bit lounge singer who assumes the role of amateur detective to solve the mystery behind the play’s rampant “Moose” murders. For what it was worth, Snooks and her blind husband Howie (“The Singing Keenes”) were probably the most likable characters in the play. I thought if I could get Anne interested in playing Snooks, I might be able to get her to pitch the role of Howie to her husband, Jerry Stiller. “Stiller and Meara in
Moose Murders
” had a great ring to it.

Once Johnson-Liff Associates had been hired and had started sending out scripts, I decided to press my luck by giving Anne a call at home. Her charmingly effusive secretary Arnie put me right through.

“So, Arthur,” said Anne. “What is it that you’re doing with this thing called
Moose Murders
?”

“Believe it or not,” I said, “it’s going to Broadway! In April, if we can get it cast in time.”

“You think it’s right for Broadway?”

“Well, it’s a big show.”

“Yeah, and the ‘bigger they are,’ as they say. Anyway… who else is in the cast?”

“Well, nobody, right now, but Katherine Helmond seems interested.”

“I love Kate! We debuted
The House of Blue Leaves
together twelve years or so ago, you know. Anybody else? How about the men? The blind guy and the lead—what’s his name—Nelson?”

“Well, Paul Sand is looking at the role of Nelson, right now, and we’re thinking about Richard Libertini for Howie, but—“

“Paul Sand’s a doll. And I know Dick—he’s a hoot.”

“Yeah, but, I was thinking . . .”

“How about this ‘Nurse Dagmar’ character?”

“Carrie Nye is looking at that.”

She was quiet for so long after that disclosure I thought I’d lost her.

“You know,” she finally said, “I’m writing a play myself—because nobody else writes plays with parts in them for me.”

“I did! It’s called
Moose Murders
!”

“I’m going to hold you to that.”

“Great! Wonderful!”

This conversation was going better than I’d expected.

“So, Arthur, is this going to Broadway?”

“Yes.”

“Well, depending who’s in it, I’d be interested.”

“That’s terrific!”

“Who’s directing?”

“John Roach.”

“Who’s he?”

As with Sada Thompson, the old “Who’s directing?” question proved to be a real conversation stopper. Things pretty much plummeted after that.

I’d already learned that you can squeak by with an unknown writer and even an unknown producer, but the relationship between an actor and a director is excruciatingly personal, and demands an enormous amount of trust. Outside the house of worship of your choice, it’s next to impossible to find that kind of trust in the unknown. The more seasoned actors, who must now guard their hard-earned reputations with their lives, understand all too well that what they don’t know may very well kill them.

There wasn’t much information for Sada or Anne or anybody else to dig up about either the producer or the director of
Moose Murders
. They went by the respective names of Force Ten Productions, Inc., and John Roach, and they were one and the same.

As chief executive of Force Ten, John had dealt primarily with providing production services for feature and television films before shifting gears to tackle a Broadway production of
Moose Murders
. The company’s biggest claim to fame to date was
Paradise Alley
, a movie written, directed, and starring Sylvester Stallone, about three Italian-American brothers living in the slums of New York in the 1940s.

John hadn’t been happy about the way things turned out with this project. Just a few months after he and his business partner had optioned the
Paradise Alley
script (originally called
Hell’s Kitchen)
, Stallone had sold another one of his screenplays to the producer Irwin Winkler. Turns out this second screenplay—a little something called
Rocky
—mirrored the first to a large degree, prompting a legal battle that ended in a settlement out of court. Winkler and his associates then went on to produce Rocky in 1976, which made Stallone a star, won just about every award under the sun, launched a string of sequels, and pretty much overshadowed in every way possible the Force Ten production of
Paradise Alley
in 1978.

John had much higher hopes for the fate of
Moose Murders
.

It was while finishing his graduate studies at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University that John had met his bride-to-be, Lillie Robertson—the granddaughter of the “king of the wildcatters,” Hugh Roy Cullen, one of Houston’s most illustrious oil men and philanthropists. Aside from being John’s spouse, it didn’t appear that Lillie held any official position at Force Ten, but when I received my copy of the Moose Murders Limited Partnership prospectus in April 1982, I found her listed as a co-partner of two other companies that were part of the Moose conglomerate—“Force Nine” and “Force Nine Explorations Ltd,” both based in Houston.

John was also chairman of the board, CEO, president, and principal patron of the Production Company, an Off-Broadway production house founded in 1977 by yet another Carnegie graduate, Norman René, who served as the company’s artistic director until its closing in 1985. Norman, who died of complications from AIDS in 1996, was best known for his collaborations with writer Craig Lucas (including the stage and film versions of
Prelude to a Kiss
, and the groundbreaking 1990 film,
Longtime Companion
). I had the privilege of working with this engagingly demure and extraordinarily insightful man in 1978 when he directed his company’s production of
My Great Dead Sister
, and again in 1980 when we moved this same play uptown for a longer run Off Broadway.

I handed a copy of my latest opus to Norman shortly after I’d pulled its final page out of the typewriter. Wisely foreseeing that this offbeat “mystery farce in two acts” would be too severe a departure from the Production Company’s usual bill of faire, Norman, in turn, tossed the hot potato over to John Roach and Force Ten Productions, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that would make theatrical history.

That’s right. It was all Norman’s fault, and I’m happy to finally get that dirty little secret out in the open.

Based on the sketchy background I’d been given by Norman, I expected to find John swaggering around in a ten-gallon hat like J. R. Ewing, or to be covered in oil from head to foot, like James Dean in the movie
Giant
. So I was a little surprised when he turned out to be a young version of Bob Newhart, both physically and in his dry style of comic delivery. With his fashionable eyeglasses, his receding hairline, and his carefully sculpted beard and moustache, there was nothing remotely “rootin’” or “tootin’” about John Roach.

We hit it off right from the start—not just because we both got a kick out of my play, but because we instantly recognized each other for what we really were—two furtive hobgoblins masquerading as “nice guys.” Soft-spoken and mild-mannered on the outside, we were both secretly harboring fierce vendettas against the human race. Perhaps as a direct result of this duplicity, we both thought sarcasm was grossly undervalued as a literary form, and were great fans of deep, dark, deadpan humor. We cringed at noisy outbursts, gravitating instead to “throw-away” remarks and barely audible barbs muttered under the breath. And yet we were remarkably well-behaved in public. We didn’t like to rattle cages or rock boats—at least not while other people were looking.

Given this shared penchant for understatement, you might wonder why John and I so eagerly began to conjure up great plans for launching a play filled to capacity with tasteless sight gags, broad slapstick, and an assortment of garish characters, each one more loathsome than the last. I’d like to say our inner hobgoblins made us do it, but the real reason is far more convoluted.

This has always been the trickiest part of the whole Moose Capades to explain, so bear with me a minute. Like a lot of people I know, I’ve always loved the unintentional comedy that can come from a particularly bad play, movie, or TV show. Few things make me laugh harder than a really lousy performance delivered with irrepressible conviction. I’m also a sucker for inappropriately mundane or inappropriately profound dialogue inserted in the absolutely wrong place, and I have a fondness for painstakingly elaborate plot twists that lead nowhere. I wanted to write a play that would capture as many shades of this kind of, admittedly,
questionable
humor as possible, and thought the perfect venue for nonsense of this ilk would be a murder mystery. For the most part, the intentionally cheesy nature of the plot, characters, and dialogue of
Moose Murders
came across as intentionally funny on the page. I don’t remember anyone ever reading the script and telling me “this is a
good
play,” but just about everybody who read it said “this is a
funny
play.” One of the main reasons John and I got along so well is because we both thought this kind of “bad” and “funny” would transfer easily onto the stage. In hindsight, I think our biggest downfall (if I had to pick
one
) was our tendency to equate “funny” with “good” in just about all aspects of our working relationship—especially in the beginning when there were plenty of easy laughs to egg us on.

When I first met John, he had recently purchased author John Hershey’s old suite at the Dakota, the gargoyle-festooned building of countless legends, located on the corner of West 72nd Street and Central Park West. It was outside this building in December 1980 that Mark David Chapman had gunned down John Lennon. Lennon’s wife, Yoko, and son, Sean, still lived here when John moved in, as did Leonard Bernstein and Lauren Bacall, among others. But what excited me more than anything else the first time I boarded the mahogany-paneled elevator that would take me to the headquarters of Force Ten, was that I was actually inside the “Bramford,” the home of the fictional couple Rosemary and Guy Wood-house from
Rosemary’s Baby
, one of my favorite films.

This first summit meeting at the Dakota happened in late January of 1982, and had been called specifically to address a growing dissatisfaction with the lack of aggressiveness we all perceived to be coming from the Johnson-Liff Associates casting office. For several weeks, now, Geoff, Vinnie, and Andy had been chatting about the working habits of certain actors (so-and-so is always late to rehearsals; so-and-so is a notorious drunk, etc.), and endlessly discussing the relative merits of “ensemble” actors as compared to “percentage” and “name-above-the-title” actors—and yet not one actor of any category had signed on to the production of
Moose Murders
.

All the “forces-that-be” were in attendance for this meeting: John, Lillie, and vice president of Force Ten, associate producer of
Moose Murders
, and graduate of (you guessed it) Carnegie Mellon, Ricka Kanter Fisher.

Most people found Ricka Kanter Fisher to be as sharply intimidating as her three-pronged name. She had a strong jaw, a razor-edged tongue, and an eaglelike gaze that could penetrate steel. Everything about her was intense, including her sense of humor and her sense of loyalty. I liked her a lot.