Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist's Letters (39 page)

    
Around this time, Lerner went to see the new movie version of Kander and Ebb’s hit show
Cabaret
, directed by Bob Fosse, and was struck by its original qualities, as he told its producer, Cy Feuer:
³⁵

    
To Cy Feuer

    
March 1, 1972

    
Dear Cy,

    
I saw
Cabaret
last night and I’ve got to tell you that in my not-so-humble opinion, it is the best screen musical I have ever seen in my life. What you and Bob have wrought is nothing short of a miracle. And Bobby’s direction is so imaginative, so controlled—every scene has such an idea behind it—every performance, every moment, in fact, that it is simply the most brilliantly directed musical film ever produced. Just when I thought we would be paddling forever through the dungfields of Norman Jewison
³⁶
and Tom O’Horgan,
³⁷
you and Bobby have really restored my faith and made me happy I’m in the musical theatre.

        
I thank you both from the bottom of my heart.

Faithfully,

Alan

Though it is unclear from this message, it seems likely that this helped Lerner think to ask Fosse to appear as the Snake in
The Little Prince
.

    
In March, it was also widely rumored that Paramount had been pursuing Frank Sinatra for the role of the Pilot in the film.
³⁸
Sinatra had announced his retirement in March 1971, so it would have been a coup to get him to return to work, but Stanley Donen,
³⁹
veteran director of
Singin’ in the Rain
, who had
been signed to direct
Little Prince
, vetoed this casting. Two years later, when the movie had been finished, Donen declared that he “didn’t think [Sinatra] would be right for ‘The Little Prince.’ The part calls for a man who must allow himself to be dominated by a six-year-old boy. It’s difficult for me to imagine Frank relating to a child in such a way.…I didn’t want to risk the movie on him.”
⁴⁰
The article also said, “Neither did Donen eagerly anticipate Sinatra’s indomitable presence on a set. Frank calls the shot on the working hours, how many takes he will agree to do, and other facets of movie making which belong traditionally to the director.” Therefore, after an extensive search that included approaches to leading actors Nicol Williamson,
⁴¹
Robert Goulet, Gene Hackman,
⁴²
and Richard Harris, Broadway veteran Richard Kiley
⁴³
(of
Man of La Mancha
fame) was cast as the Pilot in July.
⁴⁴

    
Lerner spent the remainder of 1972 completing work on the two musicals, especially on revising the new stage script for
Gigi
. A draft of the latter dated October 27, 1972, in the Gloria Swanson papers at the University of Texas at Austin shows Lerner was developing it at this time; Swanson was approached to appear in the production as Aunt Alicia or Mamita but didn’t accept.
⁴⁵
During the fall, lavish casting was confirmed for most of the roles, including Alfred Drake (
Oklahoma!, Kismet, Kiss Me, Kate
) as Honoré, Daniel Massey (
She Loves Me, Star!
) as Gaston, Maria Karnilova (
Fiddler on the Roof
) as Mamita, and Agnes Moorehead (
Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons
) as Aunt Alicia. In December, the production was firmly announced for early the following spring, to debut in San Francisco for a brief tour before reaching Broadway.
⁴⁶
But casting problems with the title role meant that it was not until March 1973 that Terese Stevens, a little-known pop singer from England, was announced as Gigi. Edwin Lester, producer of the pre-Broadway version of the show (Saint Subber
⁴⁷
was to take over for the Broadway transfer), commented that the role of Gigi had been the most difficult to cast: “We needed a girl who could appear to be 16 years old,
could sing, dance and act. We had every talent agency in the country looking for us and I personally auditioned 38 aspirants.” In the end, Katharine Hepburn (appearing in London at the time) recommended Stevens to Lerner, and after auditions with the creative team (including director Joseph Hardy
⁴⁸
and choreographer Onna White)
⁴⁹
she was hired.

    
Lerner was especially busy during 1973, with the filming of
Little Prince
taking up the first half of the year (including a six-week location shoot in Tunisia) and rehearsals for
Gigi
starting in April. The show opened in San Francisco on May 15 and moved to Los Angeles seven weeks later.
⁵⁰
This scheduling proved awkward for Lerner, similar to previous occasions when he had been trying to work on a Broadway project in tandem with a movie. This time, he faced serious clashes with Stanley Donen, who significantly reshaped the screenplay of
Little Prince
without permission, while
Gigi
opened to mixed reviews in California. Headlines such as the
Washington Post
’s “Gigi having revival pains adapting to stage version” were typical of initial impressions of the new show, with the general feeling being that the five new songs and various new scenes did not match up to the quality of those familiar from the movie.
⁵¹
“Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” was cut from the film score, and “The Parisians” was also excised during the San Francisco part of the tour. A profile in the
Christian Science Monitor
began with an ominous indication of the strain of putting the show on stage: “It was the morning of opening night in Los Angeles. Alan Jay Lerner had been up since 6 o’clock. Not nervousness so much as habit. He’d been up at that hour every morning during the agonizing weeks of rewriting after the stage version of “Gigi” opened in San Francisco. That’s when he works best and there was much to do.”
⁵²
The article included comments from Lerner on his relationship with Loewe and on their ideas for improving
Gigi
:

    
We’ve worked together 30 years…longer than any team in the history of the musical theater.…It was the greatest release, like coming home again, just as if those intervening years had never happened. We sat down and talked it through and got wildly excited and then threw it all out the next day and talked new ideas—just the way we used to do. He has such faith in me and I in him. When you work with someone
that closely, you never have the feeling that you have to show them constantly that you can still write, that you have to prove yourself with every lyric. There’s none of that with Fritz. He never kept a bar of music I didn’t like and I’ve never kept a word he didn’t like. I understand his talent, and he understands mine.…We’d had so much fun with “The Little Prince,” that it seemed like a marvellous idea. So we just kept going with “Gigi.”

        
Our troubles started with the song that introduces Gigi—“I Can’t Understand the Parisians.” It was right for Leslie Caron, but it was all wrong for Terri [Stevens]: it made her sound brash and tomboyish and not a little girl about to bloom into something else. Because “Gigi” is thin in plot, you
have
to feel for that girl. She was growing up in a manless world, and she had yearnings that were special and her very own. That sense simply wasn’t there. So at the top of the list of what had to be done after we opened in San Francisco was a new song to introduce Gigi, a touching song that really gets into her thoughts.

        
To me, a ballad that says something penetrating about one person is the toughest thing of all to write. I can write clever things, patter things, rather quickly. But when it comes to digging into somebody with a ballad—I just never know. You want to say it in terms of the character in a fresh way, try to find the special image to capture
that
moment with
that
girl.

        
It finally took me three weeks to write “The Earth and Other Minor Things.” I got the idea rather quickly, and Fritz wrote a beautiful melody to my title—which is the way we work. But then I holed up in my room to write and thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown before I could finish it. When the pressure is on, the temptation is always to settle before you’re satisfied.…We put it all in 10 days before we finished in San Francisco…and it was a new show. Almost overnight, there were lines at the box office.

        
One of the unfortunate happenstances of the last 10 years, is not so much that young people with some musical talent have been overpraised as that the older and more experienced professionals have been so despised by the press that a lot of them are afraid to go back to work in their own medium—including a lot of fine playwrights like Paddy Chayevsky, who won’t write for the theater any more.

        
Take the rock phase of the musical theater, for example. I like good rock as much as anyone else, but I also know it has no dramatic value. I know as a craftsman you can’t explore character with it, can’t dramatize nuances of feeling, can’t phrase. That’s one of the things that makes Fritz’s music so marvellous: he phrases music so I can write the way we
speak—“I’ve grown accustomed to her face.” But when everything is at the mercy of sound, then the lyricist is a pawn. I think rock will gradually disappear from the theater. There are some fine rock composers, but there will never again be another “Hair” score that blew so much fresh air into the field.

        
Yet many gifted young composers are contemptuous of the musical-theater form itself. The danger of revolt is always that a lot of good things are thrown out with the bad. The musical theater has been around since Offenbach, and there are certain pillars that hold up the house—things that make the great musicals—and they are always going to be there. My sadness is when I see someone who doesn’t deserve it being overpraised while he is alienating people who have loved and supported the musical theater. The desire to attract the young has driven away a lot of people who have always cared about the theater. The theater has never been for one age group—and it never should be.

Finally, when asked whether
Gigi
would be the final Lerner-Loewe collaboration, Lerner responded: “I don’t think so. I think Fritz will write again. I hope so. When I asked him a couple of weeks ago, he just said: ‘Oh, my boy, I’m tired, I’m tired.’ So I told him I’d mess around for a few months and then come back and see if he felt like doing something new. And that’s what I’ll do.”

    
Meanwhile, the atmosphere on the set of
The Little Prince
had been tense almost throughout, as the following letter from Lerner to Stanley Donen reveals. Evidently Donen had heard that Lerner had been appalled by his liberal rewrites of the screenplay, and Lerner wrote to defend himself, while reminding the director that they needed to remain civil for the good of the film:

    
To Stanley Donen

    
May 11, 1973

    
My dear fellow,

    
Bob Evans
⁵³
reported to me that you are in high dudgeon these days because it has reached your ears via Sam Spiegel that I am no longer a member of your fan club and that I have expressed doubts about your ability to make
The Little Prince
the picture I had hoped it would be. Or something to that effect.

        
It so happens that except for one brief nod at The Guinea in October I have not seen the redoubtable Sam since last August. However, I must confess that there have been a few other friends in the profession—namely, Kate Hepburn, Billy Wilder, Irene Selznick, Peter Viertel, John Kohn and Rex Harrison—to whom I have recounted my adventure in Tunisia, to wit: that upon my arrival I was handed a completely rewritten script that was dated a few days after I had left London the previous month. They seemed to be as appalled as I by your brutal disregard of professional ethics, especially when they all knew how enthusiastic I had been about our relationship up to that point. It would not surprise me at all if my little anecdote were repeated to others, including Sam.

        
And there you are. That is the whole story. And now, I suppose you’ll rewrite it.

        
Really, really, Stanley! What did you expect me to say about you? Are you a nut, too?

        
Robert Coote is in London. I spoke to him before he left New York, and he is most anxious to do the picture. So please get in touch with him if you have not already.

        
I hope all is going well. What a fool I would be to hope differently. After all, it is not possible for me to have a hit and you to have a flop with the same picture.

Yours,

Alan

It seems there was also tension between Lerner and Bob Fosse, to whom the lyricist wrote the following letter:

    
To Robert [Bob] Fosse

    
May 11, 1973

    
Dear Robert:

    
I have spent a good part of the year writing you congratulatory notes, and in one of them I mentioned how marvelous I think THE SNAKE number is. What obviously happened was: you were too inundated with letters of acclaim you didn’t read mine carefully—which is a shame because they are usually terribly well-written and frequently amusing.

        
Anyhow, I was delighted to hear from you and to know that even though I’m an author you are interested in what I thought.

Aye,

Alan

Shooting on the film was completed in late August, but Paramount decided to delay release until December 1974, intending it to be their big Christmas family film. This would allow further editing of the film to take place, as letters later in this chapter reveal.