Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

March 22, 1930– Stephen Sondheim:

“The outsider feeling, somebody who people want to both kiss and kill, occurred quite early in my life.”

Today we celebrate the birthday of Stephen Sondheim, my favorite theatre composer and lyricist, and a major figure of inspiration in my life.

Yesterday, I gathered on my desk, a bunch of Sondheim materials, intending to start research for this #BornThisDay post. The Husband said: “Have you actually read this stuff?”, referring to the coffee-table sized volume, Finishing The Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines And Anecdotes, or its companion, Look, I Made A Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes And Miscellany.

Me: “I like to pick-up one of these books & just open to a random page & then peruse that section. Some things are so cherished that I can’t bear to soil them. I treasure both books, waiting for the perfect afternoon to spend with them. I will know when that moment is right. As Sondheim said in Into The Woods: ‘I was raised to be charming, not sincere’.”

Today is such a day. I am enjoying hunkering down, warm and toasty at my house, drinking coffee and looking through the Sondheim books.

The greatest composer/lyricist for the theatre and I have some history together. In the spring of 1973, I saw A Little Night Music in its pre-Broadway tryout in Boston. I was in my late teens and 2500 miles from home. I sat in the darkened, half-filled theatre and let the magic and enchantment wash over me. This was not my first Sondheim musical. By this time in my life I had seen, of course, West Side Story and Gypsy on screen and stage. When I was just 17-years-old, I had talked the parental units into letting me fly to San Francisco all by myself to see the original cast (minus Dean Jones) of Company (I had more than just a little fun freely footloose in San Francisco in 1971). I had worn out the Original Cast Album of Follies earlier that year.

Just five years later, I would play Henrik in A Little Night Music. It’s a terrific role and the closest I ever came to playing an ingénue. This character plays the cello. Traditionally, the pit orchestra’s cello plays the music while the actor mimes the cello. Because I actually can play the cello, I was able to do my own playing. I thought this gave my performance a bit more authenticity, although I had to practice for hours and hours to be able to play the cello and sing at the same time… in character. I worked hard to make it work. The Husband, who saw this production before we met, says that I was rather convincing in this role.

I would go on to play Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum on two occasions, including a long, extended run at Seattle Civic Light Opera in the late 1980s.

I was in a sold out, extended-run production of Side By Side By Sondheim, a musical revue of collected songs from several produced and un-produced Sondheim musicals. Among the songs I was so lucky to perform in that show, was my favorite Sondheim tune, Anyone Can Whistle. Via the wonders of The Facebook, the director of Side by Side and I reconnected and he sent me a DVD of the show. I am not all that keen on watching myself on screen, but I was pleasantly surprised at how good the show was, how very young I looked, how much hair I had, plus what a captivating, compelling, curious, and clever vocalist I was 30 years ago. I was also sort of attractive, with single digit body fat, curly red hair, and discreet, risqué deportment. I totally would have done me.

I sang Sondheim’s Not A Day Goes By from Merrily We Roll Along for auditions for a few years in the 1980s, until I decided that singing Sondheim for auditions was cliché and too gay even for me.

Early on, I was somehow aware that Sondheim was gay. It did give some solace when I was grappling with coming out of the closet. Sondheim waited to come out as gay when he was 40 years old, and he did not live with a partner until he was 61 years old. He shared his life with writer, Peter Jones, until 1999, living at Sondheim’s Turtle Bay house that has been the songwriter’s home and writing place since the early 1960s. Katharine Hepburn used to be his next door neighbor. Sondheim:

“… up one night at about 3, pounding on the piano, writing The Ladies Who Lunch, when I heard this banging on the door. There was Hepburn, in a babushka and no shoes, saying, ‘Young man, I cannot sleep with the noise you’re making’.”

Sondheim:

“If I had to live my life over again, I would have children. That’s the great mistake I made. It’s too late now. The idea of being a homosexual and raising children was one that was just not acceptable until, my goodness, I’d say the 1980s or 1990s. You want to live long enough to see your children grow up, they’re not puppies. The joy is not just to have them, but to watch them change and grow. So, yes, that is a great regret. But as Bach proved to a great degree, you can have both. It would be nice to have both. But to have any outlet for creative energy is indeed a very good emotional substitute for not being able to put that energy into the raising of a family.”

There is common thought on Sondheim: he can do LOVE in a theatre piece, but he struggles with it in in his own life. Even people who follow him closely assumed that he was single. It came as a surprise when in 2006 he announced:

“I have someone else now, his name is Jeff. Jeff is a great joy in my life and once I had tasted the joys of living with someone, I wanted to live with someone else when it broke up.”

Jeff is Jeff Romley, a cute, youngish photographer.

Sondheim in 1962, Photograph by Michael Hardy

Sondheim has been awarded the 2017 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award, making him the first composer/lyricist to win it. The prize is given annually to a critically acclaimed writer whose body of work helps us understand and interpret the human condition. While the prize has mostly gone to novelists, including Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, PEN has stated that Sondheim has made an undeniable impact on the last 60 years of culture by writing his musicals. The precedent for giving a Literary award to a musical artist gained some traction last year, when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Andrew Solomon, president of PEN America, said:

“Sondheim has really given voice to complex aspects of the human spirit: to nuance, to psychology, to inner voices. His work points to the significance of living a moral life, and that’s never felt more urgent than right now.”

Sondheim will be honored by PEN next month, with Meryl Streep presenting his prize. Streep starred in the film adaptation of Sondheim’s Into The Woods (2014) and received an Academy Award nomination for her role.

Sondheim’s work is currently represented on Broadway with a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday In The Park With George starring my boo, Jake Gyllenhaal. And he’s working on a brand new musical inspired by the works of Luis Buñuel, that is to be presented by The Public Theater later this year.

Until then, there are the over 20 major stage shows with both Sondheim music and lyrics:

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Form (1962)

Anyone Can Whistle (1964)

Company (1970)

Follies (1971)

A Little Night Music (1973)

The Frogs (1974)

Pacific Overtures (1976)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (1979)

Merrily We Roll Along (1981)

Sunday In The Park With George (1984)

Into The Woods (1987)

Assassins (1991)

Passion (1994)

Bounce (2003), which later became Road Show (2008)

Plus, Sondheim provided the lyrics for West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), Do I Hear A Waltz? (1965), and Candide (1973).

There are also the revues: Side By Side By Sondheim (1976), Marry Me A Little (1981), You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow (1983), Putting It Together (1993/99), Moving On (2001), and Sondheim On Sondheim (2010) that are anthologies of his work.

For films, he composed the scores of Stavisky (1974) and Reds (1981), plus he contributed songs for The Seven Percent Solution (1976) and Dick Tracy (1990). He also wrote the songs for the television production Evening Primrose (1966), co-authored the terrific film The Last Of Sheila (1973) and the play Getting Away With Murder (1996). In total, his works have accumulated more than 70 individual and collaborative Tony Awards and an Academy Award.

Sondheim created cryptic crosswords for New York Magazine in the late 1960s. He was screenwriter for the television series Topper (1953). He appeared as himself in the fun film Camp (2003).

I feel so damned old. During the Company/Follies era, Sondheim appeared on the cover of Time Magazine with the caption: “The Boy Wonder Of The Theatre”. That boy went on to win more Tony Awards than any other composer, including his Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, multiple Grammy Awards including Song Of The Year for Send In The Clowns in 1974, plus that Pulitzer. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 19993, and in 2015, Sondheim was awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom by President Obama.

In March 2008, Sondheim and writer Frank Rich, then of the NY Times, appeared in an interview/conversation here in Portland, titled A Little Night Conversation With Stephen Sondheim. I was fortunate enough to attend. One of my revered revelations from that evening was that Sondheim and I share a favorite non-Sondheim musical in She Loves Me. He was very funny and charming that evening.

Sondheim celebrates his 87^th birthday today. We both got old and we both got lucky. Oddly enough, he shares this birthday with the British composer of that weird musical with the singing, dancing Cats. Go figure.

“I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.”

The post #BornThisDay: Songwriter, Stephen Sondheim appeared first on The WOW Report.

March 23, 1905– Lucille Fay LeSueur:

“I love playing bitches. There’s a lot of bitch in every woman… a lot in every man.”

Well, she has never been more on my mind, as I have been absorbed in Ryan Murphy’s fresh, funny, fiercely feminist FX series Feud: Bette And Joan, where she is played to perfection by a fearless Jessica Lange, opposite Susan Sarandon who was born to play Bette Davis. Lange:

“When she was Joan Crawford, she was Joan Crawford and that was a creation. But, I think, as time went by, what became more and more evident was that she was always Lucille LeSueur.”

Lange also has stated that she thinks that there was a sadness in Crawford that came from being underappreciated as an actor, so she tried to add that nuance to her depiction:

“She was a great beauty, but she really worked hard. I don’t know anybody that worked harder than Joan Crawford. To be Joan Crawford and to sustain this career and to create this kind of iconic mythology? There’s a lot to admire about her, especially when you think about what she had to overcome, where she came from.”

To gay men of a certain age, she is an important Gay Icon, very possibly the most important. Most of the young gays of my acquaintance have no idea who she is. This leaves me feeling as if my date on my “Best If Used By” sticker is due.

Crawford had caustic relationships with her own children, film studio executives, and fellow actors, earning a reputation as a tough-skinned bitch who valued her career above everything else. She was a relentless self-promoter. She was dubbed box-office poison just as quickly as she was “Queen Of The Movies”.

Crawford was known for playing the determined working-girls in most of her films, playing women who had a rough start in life, but eventually found love, respect, and success. Her image was inspirational to women film-goers, and Crawford became one of the highest paid and most popular movie stars of the Golden Era Of Hollywood. By her own admission, Crawford loved playing the role of bitch on film.

I have always appreciated her considerable talents and the glamour she brought to films like Grand Hotel (1931), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Women (1939). I also have snickered at the camp value of her over-the-top acting in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962), Johnny Guitar (1954), and Straight-Jacket (1964). I have marveled at the sheer queerness of Female On The Beach (1955), Queen Bee (1955), and Autumn Leaves (1957).

But, I came to appreciate Crawford as a complex, cryptic, contradictory product of a certain era and her own rough circumstances and difficult life. Just as she devoted herself to her fans, she doubtlessly inspired the downtrodden movie-goers to want more out of life and to go out and get it. She relied on men as her own doorway into a man’s world. Crawford was required to suffer for her ambition but she was also living in an age when she was actually allowed, even expected to carry and dominate a film. She was up to the task.

Crawford was a convincing creative force; an underdog who embraced good taste, glamour, and fantasy. She defied the class consciousness of the studio system that tried to marginalize and deprive her. She always held her head high. In her films, as in her life, she demanded to be counted as a woman and as an outsider. Her struggle was the same struggle of all marginalized human beings, but it was especially resonant to gay people of a certain age. She was ridiculed for her excesses, but her emotion was raw and real and she smartly underplayed it just slightly. Beneath her toughness lived a frightened woman.

Gay men recognized this and embraced her vulnerability. Beneath her flamboyance was reticence. Her promiscuity mirrored the perceived idea of gay male sexuality. We older gay guys can appreciate why Crawford would hide her insecurities and grim past behind a facade of Hollywood perfection. We loved it that she did it all for her fans. She always showed that she was grateful to those fans. One of her directors and lovers, Vincent Sherman, said her personal life was terrible and that it would take hours to bring her down from performing crying scenes.

As a bad girl myself, I appreciate that her bad behavior seemed to stem from her fears, although, just like me, she was known as a consummate professional on the set.

Crawford was on a lifelong search for love and acceptance. She certainly had affairs with other women. She married five times, including to actors Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Franchot Tone, and Phillip Terry, but never seemed to have found that true love.

Growing up in San Antonio, by the time Crawford was 14 years old, she had been raped by her stepfather and endured taunts for having entertained the boys on the high school football team. A few years later, she launched her film career via the “casting couch” at MGM. She even quipped: “It sure beat the cold, hard floor”.

Crawford’s acting career spanned more than five decades and 80 films, all while enjoying an unabashed busy sex life. Glenn Ford, John Wayne, Yul Brenner, Jeff Chandler, Dana Andrews, Kirk Douglas and even 17 year old Jackie Cooper shared her bed. Her female conquests included Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Marilyn Monroe, and pioneering female director Dorothy Arzer.

It seems that the longtime, very real feud depicted in Murphy’s television series between Davis and Crawford was the result of declaration of unrequited love rebuffed by Davis.

Crawford with Davis in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane (1962)

Crawford had a thing for bisexual men, including three of her five husbands. She even tried to seduce Rock Hudson, sneaking into a shower with him and saying: “Close your eyes and pretend I’m Clark Gable.”

Gable was probably the closest Crawford had to a great love. Gable, like Crawford, before hitting it big was known to flirt with guys and was willing to do whatever it took to make some money. Their passionate affair lasted on-and-off for 28 years despite the fact that she later claimed that Gable was “a closet bisexual with halitosis”.

Supposedly MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer had to pay-off blackmailers to hide Crawford’s appearance in stag films and an arrest for prostitution from her first days in Hollywood. A Show Biz insider once told me that he knew that Crawford made her lovers get on their knees and beg for sex.

She remains a forthright, fierce Feminist Icon, a fabulous Gay Icon, and yet Crawford is still remains very human. She was a Diva, but she never forgot her fans. Crawford could play heartache and hope on screen, the same complex contradictions she had to play in her own life. The flawed person beneath her stunning glamour should continue to resonate to gay people, even the baby gays.

In 1933

In 1971, I remember reading her book, My Way Of Life. I sat on my blanket at the beach, ready to devour Joan Crawford’s racy tell-all bio, instead I got Crawford’s meticulous advice on grooming, wardrobe, exercise, house cleaning, and food storage. Her advice came in handy through the years.

“I never go outside unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”

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