Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

From “The Wild Party” (1975), American International Pictures Via YouTube

March 21, 1930– James Coco

Do not confuse him with Coco Chanel, the fashion icon. This Coco was a gay, pudgy, bald character actor whom I admired a great deal, for reasons you can easily grasp. He worked steadily for over three decades in commercials, television, films, and stage.

He was born and grew up in The Bronx. Coco’s passion for acting began when he was a child and his mother took him to the movies:

”I got hooked by Hollywood and the glamour of the stars. I begged to see everything. In a sense, I was formed by the movies.”

Coco’s career climax came with the role of a struggling gay actor and buddy to a boozy Broadway actor played by Marsha Mason in the film Only When I Laugh (1981), adapted by Neil Simon from his play The Gingerbread Lady. As the supportive friend who wants to be a “big, big star”, Coco was winsome, waggish, winning, wise, and over the top gay. He received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination as Supporting Actor for his work in the film.

Coco is associated with the works of one of my favorite playwrights, openly gay Terrence McNally. He played in an Off-Broadway double-bill of McNally one-act plays, Sweet Eros/Witness (1968), followed by his Here’s Where I Belong, a disastrous Broadway musical adaptation of East Of Eden (1968) that closed on opening night. Coco had complained to McNally: ”Why doesn’t anybody ever write a play for a fat character actor?” McNally responded by writing Next (1969) which ran for more than 700 performances and won Coco a Drama Desk Award.

Coco also achieved success with plays by Neil Simon, who wrote The Last Of The Red Hot Lovers (1969) specifically for him and the late, great Doris Roberts. In Last Of The Red Hot Lovers, Coco played Barney Cashman, an overweight, middle-aged, married owner of a seafood restaurant who tries unsuccessfully to join the sexual revolution. Mr. Coco’s performance earned a Tony Award nomination and made him a star.

With the rave reviews and awards for Last Of The Red Hot Lovers, Coco was euphoric, saying at the time:

”I guess right now I’m giving a lot of other character actors, fat and skinny, hope. The impossible can happen. You, too, can become a star.”

Sadly, Coco was passed over for the film version of Last Of The Red Hot Lovers. The role went to Alan Arkin, but it was a stinker.

More work in Simon projects included a Broadway revival of the musical Little Me (1982), and films: the hilarious Murder By Death (1976), The Cheap Detective (1978), and of course, Only When I Laugh. Simon:

”He was an acting comedian, and he was as funny as any actor I’ve ever met. He typified the loser. As a character, he was always in trouble in everything he ever did. He exposed himself in all the most vulnerable ways, and he was always able to play the foibles of anybody.”

Always terrific in every project, usually playing a sad-sack, some of Coco’s other film roles include: Ensign Pulver (1964), Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), Man Of La Mancha (1972), Such Good Friends (1971), A New Leaf (1971), as a silent film comedian in Merchant/Ivory’s The Wild Party (1975), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984).

Although Coco’s rotund form helped to make him immediately recognizable in a wide range of roles, his struggle to control his weight was a lifelong trial during which he gained and lost hundreds of pounds. Coco’s problems with his weight compounded the demands of his career. He played a 500-pound boy who eats himself to death in Albert Innaurato’s sad play The Transfiguration Of Benno Blimpie (1977), for which he won the second of his three Obie Awards (the Tony Award equivalent for Off-Broadway productions), a role he was reluctant to take on.

Coco was well-known for his culinary expertise. He published several bestselling cookbooks and made frequent guest appearances on talk shows dressed in his trademark chef’s hat and apron.

In one of my favorite of his screen roles, he parodied Agatha Christie’s Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot in Murder By Death. In the film, Coco’s character mixed up a big bowl of subtle food jokes. The James Coco Diet (1982) included chapters on menu planning and behavior modification as well as recipes. It is probably not a coincidence that he often played characters with food issues.

Coco had many successes on stage and screen. He studied with the great acting coach Uta Hagen, yet for many, unfairly, he will always be remembered for playing Willy The Plumber in a series of ads for Drano in the 1960s.

He also did well working in television, starring in two 1970s comedy series: Calucci’s Department (1973) and Norman Lear‘s The Dumplings (1976), playing, of course, a cook. He also appeared in daytime soaps The Edge Of Night and The Guiding Light. Coco won an Emmy Award for a dramatic turn on a St. Elsewhere and another for a television adaptation of The Diary Of Anne Frank (1980). His final appearances were in a recurring role on the sitcom Who’s The Boss? in 1986-1987.

Coco’s final stage performance was in a 1986 production of McNally’s It’s Only A Play.

In “Only When I Laugh” (1981), Columbia Studios via YouTube

The reason he was such a funny performer is because he was so scrupulous in his observation of the truth. Yet, he was never just funny. The performances he is remembered for are the ones that also had a lot of heartbreak in them. He could turn an audience he had helplessly laughing and have them crying a moment later. I think he was a great actor.

Coco never talked about his private life and never opened that closet door even a tiny crack. I know that he was gay from a story told to me by a mutual actor friend, someone who had no reason to tell me something that wasn’t true. This person knew Coco well, and told me that the actor was a real pro.

Suffering from obesity for most his adult life, the talented Coco died unexpectedly of a heart attack in NYC in 1987. It makes me happy to help us to not forget Coco on his birthday.

Screen-shot from “Charlie Rose”, (2015) PBS

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.

Yesterday, I gathered on my desk, a bunch of Sondheim materials, intending to start research for this 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. I have. They are perfect for opening to a random page on a rainy day.

Sondheim 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 played 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 played 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, is 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 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.

In 1974, “Masterworks” via YouTube

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 until 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 his 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’.”

A decade ago, Sondheim wrote:

“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 struggled 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, NY Public Library Archives

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 in 2016, 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.”

Meryl Streep presented 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 has promised a new musical inspired by the works of Luis Buñuel, that has had several workshops, but no production plans, yet.

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).

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 Oscar.

Sondheim created cryptic crosswords for New York Magazine in the late 1960s.

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 Prize. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1993, and in 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom by Barack 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 88th 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.