Broadway Tails (18 page)

Dorothy missed the Saturday rehearsal. It was heartbreaking to see this once-vibrant, award-winning actress undone by a flight of stairs. Her brilliant performance wasn’t going to be seen because she couldn’t make her entrance. Sadly, we soon found out why Dorothy had such a hard time. She was suffering from cancer and died within a year. I will always remember her as Miss Hannigan—a multitalented triple threat and a true Broadway star.

On Sunday, five days before our first performance, we were called together and told that Marian Seldes would be replacing Dorothy Loudon. Marian is one of America’s most accomplished stage actresses and someone I admire a great deal. She had actually done a stint in
Annie 2
, playing alongside Dorothy, and then in the revised
Annie Warbucks
at Goodspeed, so I knew she was comfortable working with animals. I had actually thrown a small party for her when she eloped with Garson Kanin during the run of
Annie Warbucks—
she had never forgotten and to this day she always gives me a big hug when she sees me. We were fortunate to have such an actress who could come in, learn the part, and deal with dogs.

The first day of rehearsal, Noelle and Edna started barking at each other as soon as Noelle came out onstage. When the scene was finished, Marian came offstage and asked, “Why was the dog barking?” I explained about Edna and how Gerry wouldn’t be parted from her. She said, “Oh, okay.” In the final scene of the play when Noelle came in, the same thing happened. She was barking uncontrollably. We stopped for a second and Marian said, “Bill, what can we do to get this dog to stop barking?” I said, “I don’t know how to say this, but I’ve asked the director for two weeks now if he would remove his dog, and I’ve been told by the producers, the management, even Gerry himself, that he is never parted from this dog.”

She smiled with her glorious smile, turned toward the audience, and said, “Gerry?”

“Yes?” he said.

“Could you remove Edna from the theater? She’s disturbing Noelle.”

And Gerry, much to everyone’s surprise, said, “Anything for you, Marian—anything for you.” At which point his assistant came and took Edna out of the theater.

I was dumbfounded. Neither the producers, nor the stage managers, nor any of the actors had been able to convince Gerry to remove his dog, and here was Marian Seldes, in a very polite, public way, asking him to do it—and he did. It wasn’t until after the rehearsal was over that I asked Marian how she’d accomplished it. She smiled and said, “Oh, darling, I was his college professor. Apparently he still listens to me.” We had a good laugh, and for the last four days before the first performance, Noelle was able to get used to the stage, be quiet, get treats, and appear with one of the great ladies of the American theater.

The play opened in mid-December. I did the first week of performances and got Noelle settled in while Ryan Gaffney, my new trainer, followed me around. Ryan was the brother of Lauren Gaffney, who had played Annie in
Annie Warbucks
. One of the best things about my job is that I have gotten to work with so many wonderful young people and, really, become part of their extended family. Ryan was a young filmmaker between projects. He was able to come in, run the show, and make a guaranteed salary for eight weeks. At the end of the run, I had another good New York credit—and Ryan had a new dog. He and his girlfriend had fallen in love with Noelle and asked if they could keep her. She’s been living happily with them ever since.

Gypsy
is one of the best Broadway shows ever written, with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and original choreography by Jerome Robbins. Based on the life story of Gypsy Rose Lee, her sister “Baby” June, and her mother Rose, it tells the backstage story of the life of kids in show business. It is brilliant in so many ways.

I was connected to this story in a very special way. The last actress to play Miss Hannigan on Broadway was June Havoc, Gypsy Rose Lee’s sister. In the early 1980s she was in her mid-sixties, but she could still sing, dance, and tell a joke like no one’s business. Coming into the company of any established show is hard, but I had heard that she was an animal lover. So on her opening night there was a knock on her door, and when she opened it, Sandy was sitting there with a rose in his mouth and an opening-night note. I couldn’t have given her anything better.

June didn’t just like animals, she loved them. The stories of her family adopting stray animals were all true, and throughout her life, June has rescued thousands of animals to her farm in Connecticut. We have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Contrary to popular belief, she and Gypsy were close during the last part of Gypsy’s life, and June has some of Gypsy’s cherished belongings. When I visited, June would show me Gypsy’s striptease costumes, photographs, and other memorabilia. I remember opening what I thought was a script and seeing the first draft of Gypsy’s memoirs, which she had typed herself. June told me that the memoirs and the musical based on them had been fictionalized, and that it didn’t happen that way.

Gypsy
has been revived frequently. Angela Lansbury did a Broadway production in 1974, and Tyne Daly won the Tony Award for her performance as Mama Rose in 1989. I was asked to work on the 1989 production, but the producers refused to hire one of my trainers. In the show there are a small dog and a lamb. When you have an infant or very young animal, you need to provide special care and supervision. Instead of paying for my trainer to provide that care, they decided to hire one of the actresses in the show to take care of the animals. They also hired one of my competitors to deliver lambs to the theater whenever they were needed.

This poor actress had to learn—on her feet—how to take care of lambs. When that particular show was on tour in Hartford, I got a call from the local theater manager saying the lamb was very sick and asking whether I knew any vets in the area who would take care of it. I wondered why they would call me. Why should I help my competitors? But I had to help because an animal’s life was in peril. I gave them my vet’s home number, and they saved its life.

In November 2002 I was contacted about a new revival, one that would star the fabulous Bernadette Peters. This gave me another strong connection to the show. Besides being one of the great ladies of Broadway, Bernadette is also an animal lover. In 1996, in an effort to bring all the New York City animal shelters together, she partnered with Mary Tyler Moore to create a one-day event called Broadway Barks. Each year in August, all the New York animal shelters come and set up tables in Shubert Alley and bring animals for adoption. They are brought up onstage and introduced by Broadway stars. I had helped Broadway Barks from the very beginning, either in my role with the Humane Society of New York or by bringing my rescued animal stars to participate in the event. In 2005 Bernadette honored my work with an award. It means a lot to me that my Broadway peers who love animals recognized
the work that I do. I’m sure that when Bernadette agreed to do
Gypsy
, she suggested that I work on it. Rehearsals would begin in January 2003, with the first performance at the end of March and the official opening night in May.

Since this was a revival of an older show, the animals were just props. I actually knew stagehands who worked on the original production with Ethel Merman. They told me some pretty scary stories of the tryouts in Philadelphia. In the original script, as in real life, the characters had a monkey. During the tryouts, the monkey destroyed the set and ultimately was cut. When she was a child, Gypsy Rose Lee got a lamb on her birthday, and in the show, she sings a lullaby to it. The stagehands told me that they bought the lambs from the meat market. Lambs grow very fast, so when they got too big to be carried onstage, they had a barbecue.

The lambs, in particular, worried me. I thought the little dog would be easy
—
in the photos that I had seen of the other productions, they had used Yorkshire terriers. June said, though, that they owned all kinds of mutts when they were growing up. But taking care of an infant lamb is very intense. It involves bottle-feeding every four to six hours, diaper changes, and exercise. Plus, it is illegal to house farm animals in New York City apartments. I had gotten away with it with the pig in
Alice in Wonderland
, but this was going to be a very high-profile show.

I needed to find someone with a truly nurturing personality, who was animal savvy, showbiz savvy, and crazy enough to take this on. Then I remembered another great animal lover from my past. Marge Merklinghaus is the mother of Shelley Bruce, the second Broadway Annie. Marge is a stage mother in the best sense of that term
—
smart, protective, and dedicated to caring for kids. She had always had small dogs from the time I first met her, and she had become an avid wildlife rescuer. She lived by the shore in southern New Jersey, where she rescued ducks and geese and all sorts of other birds. She always had dogs and parrots in her house. Some years back I needed geese for a film, so I called Marge. She brought in some geese, and we had a ball on the set, laughing and remembering old times. Jokingly, she had said if you ever get a show, call me
—
so now I did.

At first Marge laughed, because she was retired, and said “I don’t know anything about sheep.” But I had seen her with plenty of human babies, and I knew that she could handle it. I was worried about the commute from South Jersey, because it was an hour and a half each way, but she was up for it. She had more energy than I did.

The show was being directed by Oscar Award–winning director Sam Mendes. I really wanted to rescue a dog for this show, but Sam wasn’t sure what kind of dog he wanted, and I couldn’t just pull dogs out of a shelter for him to look at. We weren’t really able to pin him down about the breed. He said he wanted a dog between 10 and 12 pounds, so I sent a picture of Noelle the Pekinese, who was just closing from her run in
Dinner at Eight
. She was about 12 pounds, but he couldn’t make up his mind.

The first day of rehearsal they have what’s called a “Meet and Greet,” usually in the morning
—
everyone says hello, the producers and creative team introduce themselves, there’s coffee and donuts. In the afternoon is the first read-through of the script. I saw Bernadette and she gave me a big warm hug. We smiled and chatted and she whispered in my ear, “Remember, I’m allergic to dogs.” I laughed and said, “Oh, come on, you’re joking, right?” She got very serious, looked me in the eye, and said, “No, seriously. I’m allergic to certain dogs, so we have to rescue one that I can work with.” Then she hugged me and walked away. I was in shock. I had planned on getting a small rescue dog, but now we needed a hypoallergenic dog, and a pound search wouldn’t work. I immediately pulled over our stage managers and our producers, and they were incredulous. How could one of New York City’s biggest animal lovers be allergic to dogs? She had two dogs
—
but it turns out they were dogs she learned she could tolerate.

I wanted to make sure that I found the right dog for Bernadette because I didn’t want to be responsible for causing her any vocal problems. I said to the producers, “Let’s set up a test in two days. I’ll bring in a bunch of dogs and let’s see how she reacts.” I had Noelle the Pekinese, and I found two Yorkies and a Yorkie mix. Bernadette had an allergic reaction to them. Marge was with me, and she went everywhere with her teacup poodle, Peanut,
who was all black and about five years old and she weighed all of 5 pounds. Bernadette saw her peeking out of her bag, picked her up, kissed her, and said, “This is the dog I want.” The problem was, Peanut was so small and all black. She looked like a big fluff ball. Sam Mendes turned to me and said, “Get one of these, but make it look like a Yorkie.”

This was becoming a huge problem. We had budgeted to adopt a dog from a local shelter, not create a nationwide search. We went on the Internet but didn’t find any parti-colored teacup poodles, which have coloring like a Yorkie. We did find a few breeders throughout the country, but they were asking $1,000 to $2,000 per puppy. We would have to fly out and see them if we were going to spend that much money. All of this was going to run up a big bill. The managers were getting angry at us, but we had to remind them we were just trying to meet the requirements of the director and the star.

After weeks of searching, we finally heard through some contacts that there was a six-month-old female parti-colored poodle living in an old shed in someone’s backyard in Alabama, and they would sell it for $600. We contacted the owner. Marge did her best to make friends and made plans to fly down to see the dog. The day before she was to fly, they called and said the dog was sick and at the vet’s. Two days later, after hospitalization for a cold, the price was $800. As Marge planned to go down again, they called and said the dog had almost died. Marge now was so worried that she finally drove to Alabama to get the dog.

Marge refused to tell me the whole story of what she found there because she said the conditions were so bad. Five days later she got this little girl back to New York and decided to call her Coco Chanel. She brought her into rehearsal where she met Bernadette, and they fell instantly in love. But Coco was going to require months of special care. Luckily, Marge was an expert on these little teacup breeds
—
Coco weighed three and a half pounds when we got her but blossomed in Marge’s care.

While Marge was working on the dog, I tackled the sheep problem. I had what seemed like a simple choice
—
I could wait until spring and buy a dwarf lamb that would stay small enough for the role, or I could go to the
meat market, where they would have lambs bred for slaughter. For a moment I envisioned my backyard filled with sheep, because the only reason anyone would take these lambs once they got older would be to eat them, and I couldn’t have that!

I called an old friend, an animal rescue photographer named Mary Bloom. She had worked at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as an exotic animal consultant, and whenever I needed advice about exotic animals, I called Mary. When I got in touch this time, she laughed and told me of a wonderful secret two hours from my home
—
an organic sheep farm. It was run by a wealthy man who created gourmet organic sheep milk and cheese on pristine lands. He produced them year-round, and in order to do that he had to have pregnant sheep year-round.