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'Plays are emotions' ... Arthur Laurents. Photograph: Andrew
Testa
The last line of Arthur Laurents's memoir, Original Story By, refers to his
partner Tom Hatcher, with whom the author lived for more than 50 years. "As long
as he lives," he wrote in 2000, "I will." Hatcher died in 2006 and the writer,
director and librettist is, in his 93rd year, adjusting to life without him.
"Busy keeping busy," he says drily and it is a stunning workload; last year he
revived Gypsy on Broadway, published a book about directing and rehearsed the
current Broadway production of West Side Story, for which he wrote the original
book. He is now working on a new play, Come Back, Come Back, Wherever You Are.
"The title will tell you what it's about."
Looked at in aggregate, Laurents's life has an improbable Forrest Gump air of
having encompassed great swaths of history and the famous figures within it. As
a young soldier in the second world war he was saved from overseas duty by being
put in a propaganda film unit with Private (George) Cukor. He was a screenwriter
in Hollywood during its most glamorous era and then black-listed during the
communist witch-hunt, when his passport was confiscated. In the 1940s a disciple
of Freud's tried to "cure" him of homosexuality and at one time he was in, of
all things, a Marxist study group with Shelley Winters. Laurents slipped by all
this more or less unscathed, saved, he says, from the worst fate of his peers -
alcoholism, chiefly - by a sense of proportion he assumes is innate. His life
and work boil down to two things: "It's about people and about love." The rest
is just gossip.
Still, it's pretty good gossip. Laurents lives in a brownstone in downtown
Manhattan, filled with art and light and photos of him and Hatcher in their
gorgeous youth. In such a kissy industry as his, Laurents's waspish tone has
caused trouble over the years. In his memoir he lists the inadequacies of the
Very Famous People he has worked with. (He once criticised Ethel Merman's acting
and was attacked on the street in the gay West Village by a man who recognised
him and shouted "Outrage! Outrage!"). He describes Lee Strasberg's sacred
Actors' Studio as a place where "neurotics and alcoholics were mistaken for
geniuses". He has, more recently, pointed out the failings of Sam Mendes, with
whom he worked on a 2003 revival of Gypsy, and he describes Graham Norton, in
his recent role in the West End production of La Cage Aux Folles, as "a sweet
queen, who's totally earnest, totally untalented and unskilled. I thought oh,
you poor man". He found the entire production homophobic. "The screaming at
anything that is suggestive of homosexuality. 'Oh, those adorable fags!' That
was the attitude. Which would've been all right if at least they were funny." He
smiles. "As you see I am equivocal about everything."
Laurents's latest memoir, Mainly On Directing, is a detailed look at the
difference between a hit show and a flop. Laurents wrote the books for Gypsy and
West Side Story, as well as La Cage Aux Folles, and the screenplays for films
such as The Way We Were and Rope. The vicissitudes of Hollywood defy analysis,
he says, but Broadway shows go wrong for the same reasons. When the script for
the musical Wicked was in development, the producers came to Laurents for
advice. He told them they didn't know what the show was about. "They said, yes,
it's about Oz. I said no it isn't. I said it's about the friendship of two
girls. I said start tracking that. That whole thing made the show an enormous
success."
The most common problem, he says, is irrelevance - the shoe-horning of fancy
numbers into a show with no mind for the integrity of the plot. Look at Kiss Me
Kate, the 1948 Cole Porter musical in which "they sing 'It's Too Darn Hot' and
then dance around for 32 choruses. Of course it brings the house down, but it
doesn't make sense to me". The other issue is directors underestimating what it
is they're getting into. "Everyone in the theatre wants to do a musical. There's
a glamour. What could be more theatrical than a musical, and besides look at all
the money I'm going to make! Except they flop like pancakes. But there is an
excitement about it. Nobody stops to think two things: it's a craft, and it's
very, very hard."
In his new production of West Side Story, Laurents tries to rectify what he
sees as the racism and kitsch of the 1961 film version - slimy-looking Puerto
Ricans in garish shirts and pancake makeup - by performing part of the script in
Spanish. The translations are effective, pin-pointing the immigrant's use of
language as emotional and political and varying minute to minute, according to
context. "You have to ask, where is the emotional point? Anita went back to
Spanish when her [Spanish] lover was killed, and Maria goes to English. To put
it crudely, love is a universal language." The show, which has always suffered a
drop in credibility when supposedly tough characters start singing and mooning
about, has a new strength and relevance.
The first show Laurents was ever taken to was in Brooklyn, where he grew up
with his lawyer father and teacher mother. His mother was a socialist atheist,
"but Jewish by Hitler's standards". His father broke away from an Orthodox
family. "He was a modest man. He was concerned with values and people behaving
decently. I think that's what he instilled in me. When I was very young he took
me on a trip to Washington. He showed me Congress, the Supreme Court - that to
him was the high temple of the United States. He taught me respect. The deepest
sense of what this country's about, I got from him." Laurents smiles. "He also
could tell a joke."
The musical was No, No, Nanette and Laurents was smitten. "All the girls were
twirling their parasols and I thought that was just wonderful. That's when I got
hooked. My dream was that some day I would walk down the aisle of a musical I
had written, while the orchestra was playing. And I did, and it was Gypsy. That
was the high spot of my life."
At the age of 10 Laurents wrote a short story for school about what happened
when Sleeping Beauty woke up. In his version, the Prince tired of her being so
behind the times and packed her off to Reno. He has "no explanation" for where
the cynicism came from. "I think in the creation of anything, I don't believe
you can open the primer, here are the rules. You feel it; you know it."
After graduating from Cornell, he took a class in writing for radio at NYU
and sold his first play to CBS. During the second world war, he joined a
broadcast unit where he wrote a short training film about electricity and a
propaganda film called This Is Your FBI, which would provide ironic relief
almost 10 years later, when the government looked in to his politics. He wrote a
play a week for army radio, where he learned economy and banished the notion
that "length equals importance". His single greatest discovery was that
"emotions precede thought, emotions determine thought; plays are emotions".
More generally, says Laurents, in his writing and his life, he was motivated
by a sense that "if you don't have honesty, you have nothing." He wasn't
officially "out" until the 1990s, but didn't disguise his life either. Despite
her atheism, he claims his mother was more disturbed that Hatcher was a gentile
than that he and her son were gay. In those years in New York in the 40s and
50s, Laurents led a wild life. "I drank an awful lot, I drugged an awful lot.
But I think I have a built-in governor, because at any point I would say OK,
I've had enough, and I'd go home to bed. I assumed everybody could do that." Did
he take a lot of risks? "No. I was never one for going to bars, that kind of
thing. I was a hopeless romantic." He smiles. "Well, no one could have that much
sex and be entirely romantic, but the dangerous side never appealed to me."
Eventually he outgrew the lifestyle. "I reached a point where I had been
drinking so much and screwing so much, it just depressed the hell out of me.
Somebody said to me, if you don't stop going to parties, you'll never write a
play. So I wrote a play."
Home of the Brave was set in a US army unit stationed in a jungle in the
South Pacific during the second world war. It rehearsed Laurents's future
themes; antisemitism, male friendship, loyalty and political betrayal. It was
years before he would create an openly gay character ("the homoerotic subtext
was subconscious" he wrote in a later introduction to the play), but the love
between the men and their assessment of war - "The worst thing you can do to a
soldier is ask him to think," says a character at one stage - won good reviews
for its depth and ambition. It opened on Broadway in 1945 and Laurents, at 27,
was convinced he had it made. "This is obviously the greatest play ever written,
it's going to run for 90 years, I'm going to run around like Moss Hart in a
smoking jacket and be happy forever. It didn't happen - it's lucky it didn't."
He shakes his head. "You realise it's part of your process, as they say - you
win some you lose some. The point is not to be deflected from finding out what
you want and doing it. Not easy."
Home of the Brave closed after 69 performances, a flop despite the reviews.
It was, however, successful enough to win him an invitation to Hollywood, where
Laurents would live and work in a state of almost constant irritation for the
next few years. His first taste of Hollywood absurdity came with the film
adaptation of his own play, in which the Jewish lead, Private First Class Peter
Coen, was replaced with a black character because, Laurents was told, "Jews have
been done." The fact there were no mixed-race units in the US army in the second
world war went completely unremarked on, even by critics.
Laurents's first screenplay was a rewrite of The Snake Pit, the 1948 film
starring Olivia de Havilland, followed by an adaptation for Alfred Hitchcock of
Patrick Hamilton's play Rope. (It came back from the censor with "HOMOSEXUAL
DIALOGUE!" written all over it in "furious blue pencil" ). It was during that
period that Gore Vidal introduced Laurents to Hatcher, who was working at a
men's department store in Los Angeles. Vidal advised his friend to go and check
him out. Laurents remembers the first exchange exactly. "I said to him, you're a
friend of Gore Vidal's? And Tom said - very drily - oh, that man of letters. Not
an average joke in that situation. Not many people would get that. We both
laughed and that was it."
When the House Un-American Activities Committee started pursuing prominent
Hollywood liberals, Laurents and Hatcher cleared off to Paris. Laurents had
never been a communist and on his return, after a lengthy investigation, wasn't
charged with anything, but he was blacklisted within the industry and unable to
work in Hollywood from the late 40s to the mid-50s. He went back to the theatre
and began the most successful period of his career.
In later years, he would work again with the men who had informed on him,
Elia Kazan and Jerome Robbins, although he protested when Kazan was awarded a
lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999. It seems inconceivable, but it's complicated
says Laurents. Robbins, who directed and choreographed Gypsy and West Side
Story, had been his great friend and although the friendship was ruined, he
couldn't banish every vestige of affection for him. They were brilliant men, he
says, with whom one wanted to work. Laurents quotes Zero Mostel: when Mostel,
also blacklisted, was asked how he could bear to work with Robbins again, he
said: "Well, I don't have to have lunch with him."
Why does he think they informed? "The same reason; they wanted to work in
films. It's that simple."
Did the experience damage his affection for his country? "No. The only
negative thing it did was that when I came back to live here, I think I was too
cautious about what I would join or give my name to. It makes you scared and
that's the whole purpose. It's so curious how many years ago it is, and it still
hangs over this country. The terrible immorality of it."
Laurents was eventually tempted back into movies by Sydney Pollack, who in
1973 directed Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in his script of The Way We
Were, a love story set against the backdrop of Laurents's own experience of the
witch-hunt. Most of the politics were stripped from the final edit, which still
infuriates him. "The only person connected to the picture who knew anything
about that period and those politics was me. Streisand absolutely identified
with that character and fought as hard as she could and lost in the end. What I
objected to was their ignorance. OK, you don't like it. Why? You don't like it
because you don't understand it. They said it's better being about love than
about politics. Just like life. That experience had a very strong effect on me.
I decided I'd never do another movie. It's not for writers. If you care about
it, if it's something that's personal, why see it eviscerated?"
The play he is currently working on, an anatomy of grief, is the first thing
he has written without Hatcher by his side. Hatcher was his first reader and
editor and they would sit, together, and go through a manuscript. Hatcher "knew
how much to say, how to say it, when to say it." Laurents has written about
their relationship before, in the play Two Lives, which featured 65 year-old
Howard (Hatcher) and his 80-year-old partner, Matt (Laurents), in their country
house outside New York, based on the couple's real house in Long Island and the
12-acre park that Hatcher himself landscaped. Howard dies suddenly at the end of
the play - "Where is it beautiful without Howard?" says his grieving partner -
and although when Hatcher read the script he knew he had lung cancer, he kept it
from Laurents. "He never said a word to me. That's the kind of man he was. He
was - if you know AA jargon - a caretaker. He took care of me all our lives.
I've never known about money. Can you imagine a grown man who never wrote a
cheque? He did it all."
To his own amazement, Laurents still appeals to him for advice. At their
house in Long Island, he often sits in the park. "It's where I'm happiest. I
talk to him. I do. I would've disbelieved it years ago, but I do. Sometimes I
have to go there for that. It's the most beautiful thing in the world and it's
going to last forever, because it's Tom."
Laurents on Laurents
From Original Story By
"From Tom's pool, you can see into the heart of his park. In summer, we swim
laps every day. Often, we walk through the park, then sit on that bench, looking
at the view. Yesterday, we sat there a little longer than usual, just looking at
the changing light, not saying anything. But Tom reads my mind.
'You're going to live twenty more years,' he assured me.
Maybe even more. As long as he lives, I will."
From Mainly On Directing
"Tom and theatre, that's what my life has been. And that's what this book is
- an effort to say thank you by doing what I can to make the theatre
indestructible and to keep Tom alive."
• Quoted here is the last paragraph of each of the two books I've written:
Original Story By (2000) and Mainly On Directing (2009). Tom is Tom Hatcher, 12
years younger than I. We shared every aspect of our lives for 52 years. He died
on 26 October 2006.
The passages speak to the essence of my life and to the unwanted
unpredictability of life