Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
38th Edition.
Ken Bloom. Show & Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 337pp.
Theater, like its sister arts, is an overflowing fountain spouting a never-ending stream of anecdotes that get passed along orally from person to person, and in print, such as memoirs and interviews, eventually to be absorbed by an editor and published in a collection. I reviewed one here some months ago, Peter Hay’s Theatrical Anecdotes.
Eight years ago, Broadway maven Ken Bloom (Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time, etc.) put together an extensive theatrical potpourri, not all of whose contents qualify technically as anecdotes—like a final chapter devoted entirely to quotes—but that nonetheless allow for pleasurable dipping when the mood strikes. Despite its title, Show & Tell: The New Book of Broadway Anecdotes spreads its anecdote-gathering web much further, including dinner theaters, so long as well-known names are involved.
Bloom’s extensive collection has been loosely organized into 24 chapters, given titles such as “Personalities,” “Naming the Show,” “Writing the Show,” “Casting,” “The Race Issue,” “ Theaters,” “Previews,” “Superstitions,” “Publicity,” “Original Cast Albums,” and so on. I say “loosely” because many examples could as easily be in one chapter as in another. Some chapters are subdivided into separate sections when a group of stories are closely related.
Theatrical celebrities galore are sprinkled through the pages, most of them familiar from their work in shows from the 1920s on. These would be the Mermans, Martins, Gillettes, Kaufmans, Princes, Fosses, Verdons, Loessers, Berlins, Abbotts, Stapletons, Kayes, Merricks, Mostels, and so on. Now and then someone more up-to-date, like Lin-Manuel Miranda, pops up and, occasionally, a story from the early 20th century involving someone like Lillian Russell, Maurice Barrymore, or David Belasco leaps into view.
Reading the book straight through is a bit of a chore, as the material is made up of hundreds of bits and pieces, often consisting of a single sentence or two, balanced by longer stories several paragraphs in length. A considerable number of entries is intended not so much to tell an amusing (or, sometimes, tragic) tale but to share a piece of theatrical lore with no particular incident attached. Many little-known historical factoids thus come our way, like how Marlon Brando’s undershirt came to be ripped in A Streetcar Named Desire or the paragraph about how often songwriters have contributed, without credit, to others’ Broadway scores.
So, as in every similar collection with which I’m familiar, the result is a grab bag of theatrical memorabilia, some funny, some sad, some informative, some innocuous, and some hoary from repetition. Examples of the latter include Dorothy Parker’s quip about Katharine Hepburn running the emotional gamut from A to B, and yet another rehash of David Merrick’s publicity stunt of advertising a show by posting glowing blurbs from people with the same name as the major critics.
To give a rough idea of the contents, I thought I’d try keeping your eyes open by providing a few of the racier tidbits, albeit greatly trimmed to save space. Let’s start with the one about director George Abbott taking actress Maureen Stapleton home from a party in 1970 and making a move on her. Seeing that the actress, in her mid-40s, was startled, the octogenarian director admitted, “I’m trying to go to bed with you.” “Oh, all right. Why didn’t you say so,” she replied. For years afterward, a good time was had by both until Abbott, in his 90s, began dating Joy, his future wife.
Comic actor David Burns’s sense of humor involved crude shenanigans, one source noting “that if you ever had your hand behind your back, Burns would put his cock in it.” John Gielgud once said to a dinner party guest that “Margalo is a cunt!” only to notice actress Margalo Gilmore seated next to him. Abashed, he improvised, “I wasn’t talking about you Margalo, I’m talking about another Margalo, darling.”
When House of Flowers was having its tryout in Philadelphia, Marlene Dietrich (during her affair with composer Harold Arlen) met author Truman Capote, designer Oliver Messell, and Noel Coward, each with his boyfriend. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this show,” said the movie star, “I’m the only one here with balls!”
After star Nicol Williamson’s unpleasant behavior drove costar Evan Handler to leave the cast of I Hate Hamlet, the former would get the audience to sing along during the curtain calls to “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and then tell them to “head home and enjoy a nice juicy slice of sexual intercourse!”
Several tales deal with masculine endowments. During the Boston tryouts for 110 in the Shade, gay TV actor Robert Horton emphasized his character’s machismo in a way that caught Noel Coward’s eye. He told Marlene Dietrich that “Robert Horton’s idea of acting the cowboy is to push his pelvis forward and swagger. I wanted to shout, ‘Show us your cock and get on with it.’” And while we’re on the subject, let’s recall when British comedienne Hermione Baddeley, having seen Oh! Calcutta, declared, “The sketches are too long and the cocks are too short!” These should be sufficient for the nonce.
Female body parts are barely mentioned, the sole example being when James Earl Jones, appearing with John Stamos in The Best Man, whispered to him, “There are some nice boobies in the third row.”
Wisecracks make up a sizable portion of the text. One I like tells of an angry star exiting the Martin Beck Theatre while berating his dresser. When a fan tapped his shoulder, he looked at her in fury, asking what she wanted; an autograph, she answered. He rudely turned his back on her, only to get a whack from her umbrella. “That’s the first time the fan has hit the shit,” cracked the doorman.
One more for the road. Yul Brynner, dying as the king in The King and I, used to break up the actor portraying the crown prince by telling him a joke about the god Thor making love to a mortal woman, an exploit he described to Zeus when back on Olympus. Zeus told Thor to let the woman know his identity as a deity, which he thought would please her. On his next earthly visit, the god said, “I am Thor!” to which she responded, “You’re Thor? I’m so thor I can hardly pith.”
Naturally, there’s a lot of dead wood scattered through Bloom’s anecdotal forest, and his book suffers from surprisingly careless proofing and fact-checking. At one point he avers that actor Brandon Maggart is married to actress Diane McAfee, with whom he’s lived for many unmarried years. But, for all its bumps and bruises, Show & Tell should give theater buffs a pleasantly informative ride down the boulevard of showbiz arcana.
I’m sure it won’t be long before someone puts together yet another assemblage of things theater people say and do. For the time being, we’ve got Bloom’s Show & Tell, Hays’s Theatrical Anecdotes and Broadway Anecdotes, Gordon Snell’s The Book of Theatre Quotes, the four volumes of anecdotes edited by Jennifer Ashley Tepper, and others with which to indulge our obsession with what we’re told really happens in the world of make-believe.
Coming up: Shauna Vey. Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
