My Life in Pieces (50 page)

The whole life as presented by Mrs Leaming is melancholy reading. To read of the studio’s destruction of
The Magnificent Ambersons
is actually painful. In the end, Welles emerges as a somehow fated figure, not sure of what hit him. In this, and so many other ways, he seems to resemble another O. W., sipping himself to an absinthe death, telling the stories he was never going to write.
Bright Lucifer
is the title of an early play of Welles’s. He certainly fell; but not before having soared higher and with more tangible results than any maker of our century.
Requiescat in pacem
.

I listened to the siren voices telling me that I should commit myself to a
full biography, with the result that here I am, still writing it, twenty years
on, two large volumes published and a third to come. One of the people
who urged me on most passionately, God rest his soul, was the
éminence grise
of Condé Nast, Leo Lerman, the very embodiment of the old Man
hattan, elegant, funny, informed, naughty. I wrote his obituary for the
Guardian
in 1994.

New Yorker Leo Lerman, who has died aged eighty, was an actor, a stage manager, a set designer, a biographer, a critic, and, through his work at Condé Nast, a legendary editor. He was also a man whose social network generated a salon that stretched across five decades.

Born in Harlem, educated at the Feagin School of Dramatic Arts, his Thirties career in theatre was followed in 1942 by his first
Vogue
article, on five women of the Renaissance. By the end of the decade he was working for
Saturday
Review
,
Harper’s Bazaar
,
House and Garden
and
Mademoi
selle
, where he was a contributing editor for more than a quarter of a century. As a features editor at American
Vogue
in the Seventies he commissioned writers such as Iris Murdoch, Rebecca West and Milan Kundera. He reviewed dance, theatre, music and wrote biographies of Leonardo and Michelangelo and a prize-winning history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ismail Merchant introduced us seven years ago at the Connaught Hotel. The meeting was informed by a hectic gaiety characteristic of both men and not exactly alien to me. The fourth person present, Gray Foy, silver-haired, poker-backed, and sceptical at so much sudden energy, provided such stillness as was on offer. The feeling of an exploding nursery wasn’t contradicted by the fact that the centre of all the uproar, Leo himself, was alarmingly frail and apparently ancient. Age was hardly to be gauged, since even then, on first glimpse, the physical circumstances of the chair-bound man – thick wisps of white hair around the chin, tufts of it on the back of the head, lightly mottled pink flesh, dainty hands, unreliable legs, heavy unyielding torso – had the air of wittily assumed disguise, an elaborate masquerade by a dazzling infant whose fearless young eyes stared at you exhilarated and challenging, through the hugely magnifying lenses of his spectacles. Regally seated in the middle of the room, he somehow had the air of a child in a high chair.

What was I doing? he wanted to know, impatiently, as if we had been reunited after too long an absence, though this was our first encounter. A book, I said, about Charles Laughton, and he beamed like the Pope hearing a perfect confession. Books were always to be encouraged. What kind of book? I’ve tried, I said, to make it like the book that Parker Tyler wrote about Tchelitchew. ‘Tchelitchew!’ he cried, clapping his hands. ‘Tchelitchew! I never thought I’d live to hear his name again.’ And then we were off on a conversation that never stopped till the day that he died, though an ocean and the rest of our lives made sure that we only ever really met half a dozen times.

He was my idea of heaven: a conduit of the brilliant dead who as he spoke entered the room more really than any hologram, Toscanini and Balanchine and Gertrude Stein and, yes, Tschelitchew, as vivid as if he’d just come off the phone with them. He’d lived at the hub (in his case the hubbub) of the world of art since he first arrived on the scene, as a personable young actor. He had been at every premiere, every
vernissage
, every
répétition générale
, was apprised of every scandal and had launched a few himself, knew everyone and had subjected them all to his X-ray analysis, wickedly unfair and then suddenly tender. He had gloried in it all, the carnival of personality, the drama of talent.

‘Glorious!’ was his favourite word. I have faxes from him which simply say ‘Glorious, glorious, glorious. Love, Leo.’ Ten days ago, I was sifting through some papers and found a photocopy he’d sent me of a page of
Vogue
magazine (where he’d reigned for so long as a sort of journalistic sybil, having soon abandoned the stage proper for the theatre of society). It was an account of New York, 1935. He’d scrawled across it ‘See the lovely life I lived!’ He was living it still, up to the last moment. The past was no nostalgic refuge for him: it was present – but so was the world in which he lived, in which his interest was absolute.

Frail though he was when I met him, he became eggshell delicate as the years went by. Not for one second did he let this interfere with the daily schedule he pursued around America – even, if necessary, to the unloved Los Angeles, always pronounced with a hard ‘g’ – and around the world until the brutal hassle of international travel became unendurable. At home, in New York, nothing would stop him. Across busy thoroughfares, up stairs and through rough throngs Leo and Gray would struggle towards the desired event, Leo dispensing a witty if barely audible commentary on the passing scene until finally, ensconced in his seat, aching,
brittle limbs carefully arranged in front of him, he would turn his great child’s head to the stage like a fledgling at feeding time, ever-expectant. Through those monstrously magnified eyes he took it all in, missing nothing, no image, no phrase, no gesture. All became part of the living record of his times that constituted his inner life. There were the parties, too, attended by him, blessed by him or given by him. Home – opposite the Carnegie Hall, where else? – was the last of the great salons, a vast apartment rammed to the ceilings with bibelots, a temple of bric-à-brac, ‘all quite worthless,’ Leo would say, ‘but every one of them means something.’

Books, records, paintings, sculptures, fans, mantillas, boots, and there, in the centre of it all, Leo, wearing one of those embroidered caps favoured by Victorian bibliophiles, adding a perfectly appropriate touch of
Alice in
Wonderland
. And at the centre of Leo was Gray, their adoring relationship on the knife-edge of passionate incompatibility, filled with an appalled fascination with each other. Each radiated immense strict caring for the other: the love was tangible. You could cut it with a knife. Love was the heart of it all for Leo. Years ago, I introduced him to a new amour of mine. After a brisk interrogation along Lady Bracknell lines, he beamed approval, then, as we left, grew suddenly grave. ‘Be kind to each other,’ he said with great precision, and we did our best to obey. Instructions of this kind were always forthcoming from Leo, and when they were, you listened. It seemed that he had berated, advised and admonished half of the Western world.

Leo was writing his memoirs at the end. He was a memoir himself, an antiquarian of our times, John Aubrey and Chips Channon, the Goncourt brothers and the Duc de Saint-Simon, rolled into one, made pink and snowy and put in an embroidered cap. He seized life greedily as it passed, hooting with delight when it pleased, utterly undaunted when it didn’t, passing light and witty judgements on love and art and the times with exuberant delicacy, gay as a cricket, irrepressibly naughty, unerringly right. New York is scarcely going to be New York without him.

With
Ballad
in the can, I came back to England to direct my first musical,
Carmen Jones
. I wrote about it for the
Daily Telegraph
to coincide with
the revival of 1994, which had an unusual tour: Plymouth and Tokyo.

I was in the middle of rehearsing my production of
Die Fledermaus
in Glasgow when the producer Howard Panter called me and wondered whether I knew
Carmen Jones
. Well, of course I did – who hadn’t seen Otto Preminger’s movie, beaten out dat rhythm on a drum with Pearl Bailey and been to de café on de corner with Dorothy Dandridge, while Harry Belafonte told her about dis flower dat she threw his way? Panter wanted to know if I’d like to direct it: he was about to secure the rights from the Hammerstein estate. I gulped. The lyrics were undoubtedly brilliant, and the black setting a masterstroke, but there was something somehow ponderous about the film that made me wonder if it wasn’t a period piece which was a great idea for its time but rather reach-me-down forty years later.

Then I read the script of the original 1943 Broad way production. I was struck all over again by the deftness and the rightness of Hammerstein’s relocation of Bizet’s opera to a black American Deep South setting; but I was also struck by a curious coincidence. He seemed to have done, triumphantly, what I was struggling to do with
Die Fledermaus
: in an attempt to cast off the middle-aged never-never-land air of most productions of that old chestnut, I had transposed it to a contemporary
Glasgow setting. I hadn’t quite got it right, whereas Hammerstein had triumphantly hit the nail on the head, finding the perfect marriage of music and setting. What had inspired him to make his version of
Carmen
?

Carmen Jones
was, from the start, a labour of love. Writing a screenplay based on the life of the grandfather (Oscar I) who had lost a fortune trying to promote accessible and dramatically coherent productions of opera in an age of all-singing, non-acting stars, Oscar II became possessed of a missionary desire to bring opera to the people, in English and with credible characters in recognisable situations. The choice of
Carmen
can’t have been difficult. The most popular of all operas, crammed with hit numbers as well as having one of the clearest and best-told of stories, its atmosphere is exotic and irresistible. Whether he was influenced in setting it among black people by other current black versions of famous classics – Orson Welles’s 1936 voodoo
Macbeth
or the
Swing Mikado
of 1938, or indeed by the Gershwins’
Porgy and Bess
– is hard to say, but once hit upon, the idea of transferring the piece to the Deep South of America must have seemed inevitable: the Gypsies, among whom so much of the opera is set, have a perfect counterpart in black America. Foreign and yet indigenous, a culture within a culture, passionate, physical, colourful, musical, they were a perfect solution to the problem of making the people of the opera both American and exotic. The changed setting was only a starting point. It needed to be worked out in detail; Hammerstein’s ingenuity in doing so led him to some radical results.

In transposing the four acts of the opera, Hammerstein presented a greater range of black experience than had ever been shown on the Broadway stage, let alone on film. Setting his first act in a parachute factory, with the workers and soldiers of an impoverished Southern black town, he moved the second act to the very different world of a louche and rather shady bar in the same town, a world of pimps and good-time girls, where the world heavyweight champion drops by to pick up a one-night stand, until his managers persuade him to think of his trainer’s instructions. For the third act (Bizet’s Gypsy encampment) Hammerstein takes us into rich middle-class black society, at the champ’s elegant party in his fabulous Chicago South Side mansion. The fourth act presents a typical urban sports crowd, screaming encouragement at their hero before he fights his latest engagement.

It was Hammerstein’s theatrical instincts, rather than a commitment to the black cause, that had made him choose a black milieu for the piece
(he announced, extravagantly, that he was thinking of devoting the rest of his working life to transposing operas, planning next to do
La Bohème
set in New York’s Greenwich Village). But he was a committed liberal, and was concerned both to display what he called ‘the huge wealth of black talent in this country’, and to represent black life credibly. In the first act, for instance, he changes Bizet’s dreamy chorus of factory girls extolling cigarette smoke into a celebration of one of the workers who has become a pilot – ‘Flying Man’. The Broadway audience in 1943 would immediately have recognised the allusion to Roosevelt’s recent enactment – under threat of a mass march on Washington by black activists – of legislation permitting blacks to train as pilots at a school specially established for them at Tuskegee Black University. Equally, his reinvention of the toreador Escamillo as Husky Miller, the coming heavyweight champion of the world, was clearly and squarely based on Joe Louis, whose visits to black neighbourhoods with his wife, the nightclub entertainer Marva Trotter, were described as being like royal visits – a scene exactly paralleled in Hammerstein’s Act Two, set in Billy Pastor’s bar.

The relocation of the opera seemed to stimulate his imagination at every turn. Part of the creative excitement of
Carmen
Jones
derives from the need which drove Hammerstein when he wrote it. In 1942, when he set to work, he had endured ten years of flops, the great days of
Desert Song
and
Showboat
many years behind him. He withdrew to the countryside with the La Scala recording of the opera on twelve 78s, and, working to no commission and with no prospect of a production, rediscovered himself both as a musical-dramatist and as a lyric-writer. His work on
Carmen Jones
has a new directness and understanding of the idea towards which he had for years been striving: the idea of the organic show, where numbers don’t stop the show for a song but grow directly out of the action and advance it. Only weeks after he’d completed his work on
Carmen
, and before he even had a producer for it, Hammerstein was approached by the Theater Guild to work with Richard Rodgers on an adaptation of the current Broadway hit
Green Grow the Lilacs
. Out of this grew
Oklahoma!
, and out of
Oklahoma!
– it’s not too sweeping a statement to make – came the whole of the modern American musical theatre, the direct fruit of the lessons he learned in writing
Carmen
Jones
.

Getting the show on was no easy task. His contemporaries thought he was mad. How to find one hundred and fifteen black performers (his original
cast) who were well-enough trained to sing Bizet’s score? Because that, with a few minor alterations and cuts, was what he had used, transposing nothing and leaving all the musical excitement and challenge untampered with. Fortunately, he was introduced to the flamboyant and audacious impresario Billy Rose, who, on hearing of the idea, eagerly put his weight behind the project, which led his fellow producers to think that he had gone mad, too. A production of all the talents was immediately assembled: Howard Bay and Raoul Pène Du Bois to do sets and costumes, Eugene Loring to choreograph, Charles Friedman (of the left-wing Labor Project) to direct the book, Robert Shaw, then and now the greatest of American chorus masters, to work with the ensemble, and Joseph Littauer to conduct; the whole to be supervised by Hassard Short, English-born wizard of lighting and overall conception.

There was only one small snag: they couldn’t find a cast. After three months of extensive auditions, the team had not found a single performer adequate to the show’s musical demands. On the point of abandoning the project, they had the extraordinary good fortune to run into the legendary A&R man, John Hammond. Once he had ascertained that Hammerstein’s version was a radical departure from the eyeball-rolling, happy-darkie nonsense that Broadway was pleased to purvey, Hammond put his huge knowledge of black talent at the team’s disposal. Bit by bit, they found their cast: Luther Reed, a riveter and dockworker as Joe, Glenn Bryant, a New York cop who had to be relieved from his beat by central government intervention, as Husky Miller, and, finally, Muriel Smith, a twenty-year-old first-year music student at the Curtis Institute, the first ever black student to enrol there, as Carmen; she was working nights as a chemist to pay her way through college.

Billy Rose’s blind faith was rewarded with staggering reviews, from both music and drama critics. Among the most perceptive was that of the
New
York Herald Tribune
’s music critic, the composer Virgil Thomson, who hailed the show both as a reproach to prevailing standards at the Metropolitan Opera House and as a return to Bizet’s original conception before it was transmogrified, on his deathbed, and without his consent, into a Grand Opera. Thomson’s phrase to describe both
Carmen
and
Carmen
Jones
– ‘realistic proletarian melodrama’ – is brilliantly precise. This is what gives both the opera and the ‘musical play’ (his own phrase) that Hammerstein adapted from it its feeling of coming from today’s headlines.

We started work on
Carmen Jones
knowing that if we could capture a half of the excitement generated by the original show, we would set the town alight. In addition, there was the chance of working with an all-black cast – an ambition I’d long had, hoping to do a black version of
The
Importance of Being Earnest
, but very happy with the hand that fate, Carmen-like, had dealt me. My starting point, like Hammerstein’s, was the music. I knew and admired, from his recordings with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the Seventies, the work of the black American conductor Henry Lewis. Never having met him, I had a powerful instinct that he was the man we needed; an instinct that proved right in various unexpected ways. I had forgotten that he had been married to Marilyn Horne, the voice of Dorothy Dandridge in Preminger’s film, and thus knew the show and its special demands intimately; moreover he had conducted five different productions of
Carmen
, including most performances of the legendary one at the Met starring Horne, initially conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

At Sardi’s one summer evening we decided the basic principles that have informed all our work on the show: it would be essentially realistic (psychologically and socially detailed, a story of real people in a real world), every word of Hammerstein’s astonishing lyrics would be heard, and clearly heard, the orchestral sound would not mimic a symphony orchestra’s, nor yet be a synthetic concoction, but would reproduce the sound of a Forties band. Dave Cullen, master-orchestrator of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows, would arrange the score. In fact, Hammerstein’s deliberate setting of the piece in the year of its composition, 1943, in wartime America, would be respected; Bruno Santini’s designs would be completely in period. So far so good. But then we ran up against Billy Rose and Oscar Hammerstein’s problem: where were we to find a cast?

The answer was simple: in America, for the most part. The original cast of the Old Vic production was mostly imported from the States; there simply were not enough British black performers with the vocal skills to fill the roles. The show opened with great success; as the show ran on we needed to recast. To our delighted amazement we discovered that more and more British black artists, fired by the example of the American artists in the show, had worked on their own on their voices, and were coming to us with their ranges and their stamina transformed out of recognition. Thus the present production – tighter, sharper, more direct than before – fields a cast which is one hundred per cent British. To be
pleased about this is not chauvinistic: it is entirely in the spirit of Oscar Hammerstein’s desire to celebrate ‘the huge wealth of black talent’ in his country. We had exactly the same ambition when we started out; that, and to tell the terrible story he had so brilliantly reclaimed from the stuffy confines of the opera house, of the maddeningly free spirit whose lover, unable to possess her, turns into her killer.
Fatal Attraction
indeed.

Two singers who played Joe were particularly remarkable: Gary Wilmot,
hitherto known for light comedy and a long run in
Me and My Girl,
and
Anthony Garfield Henry, originally a dancer, who had started to do a lit
tle bit of singing in
Miss Saigon.
At his audition he sang ‘Dis Flower’, and
he was frankly not up to it, so we said what we always said: ‘Go away
and work on it and come back and see us.’ And he did, about a year later.
He started singing, very quietly, and we started to wonder how soon we
could stop him without bruising his dignity too much, when he slowly
started to expand his dynamic range, till he was singing at triple forte,
perfectly under control, perfectly in pitch, with absolute rhythmic control.
He was a fully fledged singer, who when he came to do the show – and of
course we cast him immediately – brought astounding power to the end
of the third act and the final duet. A year or so later, when I was direct
ing Puccini’s
Il Trittico
at Broomhill Opera, I asked him to sing Luigi in
Il Tabarro
, a famous and very challenging Domingo role, and he was again
magnificent; a year later he sang Don José for Opera North.

The day after the reviews for
Carmen Jones
came out, I was asked to direct
My Fair Lady,
which, of course, I did, with Edward Fox as Higgins, Helen
Hobson as Eliza and Bryan Pringle as Doolittle. The choreographer was
Quinny Sacks, the set designer David Fielding, the costume designer Jasper
Conran, and the hats – those all-important hats – by Philip Treacy. It was
a production of all the talents. Everyone did superb work – and it didn’t
work. This was due to a vast complex of reasons, but in the end I must
carry the can, as the director always must. I wrote a perhaps overexuber
ant piece for the programme, some weeks before we had actually opened.