Read an Excerpt

Jerome Robbins

Simon & Schuster

Chapter One

The success of Fancy Free changed Robbins's life in ways both gratifying and disturbing to him. Ballet Theatre immediately scheduled extra performances of the runaway hit, and, while the mingy ten-dollar royalty payments didn't add much to his soloist's wages, producers started nosing around, trying to figure out whether this bright new choreographer might be able to deliver on Broadway. The day after the premiere, he wrote to his cousin Bob Silverman, wounded overseas and recuperating in a British hospital, "Yesterday I was a schnook from Weehawken, and if I went to a producer's office, I couldn't get by the secretary; and this morning twelve producers called me and asked me to do their next show." Had he been any less talented, he wondered, a week ago? He signed with Century Artists to represent and advise him. He moved to a bigger apartment at 34 West Eleventh Street, around the corner from Oliver Smith. He was confident enough of his potential earning power to embark on psychoanalysis with Dr. Frances Arkin in order to free himself of the imps that beset him, whining in his ear: Not good enough! Not handsome enough! Not desirable enough! Not successful enough! And not heterosexualenough.

Sought out by a reporter for the short-lived NY PM not long after the premiere of his ballet, Robbins spoke with the unguarded enthusiasm of the inexperienced interviewee: "I've got a dozen ballets I'd like to do, as soon as I get a little time.... I'd like to do several plays as ballets. Street Scene is one; Clemence Dane's Coming of Age is another. I'd like to do a life of Mark Twain, a ballet of Americana it would be. And I'd like to do a ballet I did at Camp Tamiment ["a la Russe"], which was kind of a burlesque on classic ballet."

By May 1, 1944, however, the day after the interview appeared, he had completed a draft (originally designed for submission to the Theatre Guild) of what he conceived of as a "ballet dance play in one scene, combining the forms of dance, music, & spoken word into one theater form." This, in embryo, was a form he would wrestle with on and off almost to the end of his life. He may indeed have cooked up Bye-Bye Jackie practically overnight; however, it reads like a dramatic prelude to Fancy Free, and a letter from Robbins to Bernstein indicates that a trilogy was discussed. Seventeen-year-old Jackie is itching to get out of his safe Brooklyn neighborhood; he's surprised to find that the girlfriend he's known all his life is also restless, also yearning for something - she doesn't know what. Amid the rhythmic neighborhood games and chatter Robbins maps out, there's admiring talk of an older boy who's just returned from naval duty in the Aleutians. Jackie enlists. In Scene 4, he's in Navy attire, back sitting on his stoop: "... [T]he whole scene is based on his adjustment to the uniform ... changing the way he walks, the way he leans against the post, the way he sits ... he adjusts the hat till it gives him a cocksure look ... he tries different ways of saying hello ... of lighting a cigarette, of changing the whole moody adolescent boy to the exterior of a sure as hell of himself sailor ... of looking secure and safe."

The successfully cocksure sailor, however, was destined to find a home in a sturdier package: On the Town.

It was Oliver Smith's idea to take Fancy Free's basic situation - three sailors on shore leave in New York - and expand it into a musical comedy. He would serve as set designer and, with Paul Feigay, as coproducer. Robbins would choreograph, Bernstein write the score. Both men, according to Smith, at first resisted the idea. Bernstein was ambitious to be known as a composer of symphonic works, and his mentor, Serge Koussevitzky, kept reminding him of his destiny as a conductor. Robbins was intent on developing his reputation as a ballet choreographer. Once Smith had persuaded the two of them, the question became, who'd do the book and lyrics? Bernstein took Smith to the Blue Angel to see one of the regular performances of Betty Comden and Adolph Green; the two at the time constituted, in their words, "the desperate remains of our old nightclub group, 'The Revuers' ... hanging on by our still God-given teeth as a duo." Bernstein was not only a friend, he was a fan; they claimed he knew the words to all their songs better than they did. Robbins originally favored Arthur Laurents for the book and John Latouche for the lyrics but was easily persuaded to collaborate with these ardent fans of Fancy Free.

Comden and Green had never written a straight song, but blessed with the hubris of youth, they needed no persuading to work on the new musical comedy project as lyricists and bookwriters. The collaborative process that began in late June was probably Robbins's happiest. Four smart young people - all thirty or under - innocent of how painful getting a Broadway show onto the stage could be. Bernstein and Robbins had considerable input into the plot, and the collaborators met frequently, even though Bernstein had conducting commitments and Robbins, now a soloist with Ballet Theatre, was still going on the road. In August, while Jerry danced in Los Angeles and Lenny conducted Fancy Free, as well as a Hollywood Bowl concert on his twenty-sixth birthday, Smith sent Betty and Adolph out to California, and for several weeks the four continued to conjure up New York from a Spanish villa in the Hollywood hills. Sprawled on his bed, slightly drunk on a hot night in New York, Smith wrote Robbins a euphoric letter about the project so far and about his own preliminary sketches: "My Coney Island scene is a dream, very funny, and yet very beautiful, and slightly lascivious at the same time. You will love it ... It will leave almost the entire stage free for dancing."

Initially, all were wary of the idea of three sailors as musical comedy heroes. Recalled Green, "I think we were all secretly afraid that once we presented, articulated, and moved around these three musical comedy sailors we might have what would turn out to be a grade-B movie." The 1943 Oklahoma! notwithstanding, Broadway musicals tended toward fluff like Mexican Hayride, with Bobby Clark, and Follow the Girls. On the Town was witty and occasionally zany, and all three sailors miraculously found girls they hoped to spend the rest of their lives with, but the level of craft and sophistication elevated it. As Bernstein said, "the subject matter was light, but the show was serious." For one thing, its pressured pace and bittersweet edge derived from the fact that these sailors have only twenty-four hours to see New York and possibly find love before they ship out. When the three couples said their good-byes at the dock and sang "Some Other Time," a line about time being "precious stuff" for folks in love would have struck 1944 spectators as especially poignant; the three, like so many other sons, lovers, fathers, and husbands, might never return home. Work had begun on the script only weeks after Allied troops had landed in Normandy and thousands had died. Comden's husband was serving overseas.

In light of all the songs Bernstein wrote and all the dances Robbins planned, it was fortunate that the script managed to attract the veteran director George Abbott - never one to quail at pruning a show into shape. Abbott had cowritten and staged On Your Toes, The Boys from Syracuse, and Pal Joey, among other hits; his name attracted hitherto reluctant investors to On the Town. Asked why he had signed on, he said, "I like the kids connected with the show." "Kids" is the operative word, and the collaborators, for the most part, accepted without protest Abbott's decisions as to what would work and what wouldn't. Who were they to argue with a Broadway pro? When Comden and Green went to him to plead for their original opening and ending, which would have made the entire action of the show a flashback, he said they could have their prologue or him. They didn't take long to make the choice.

On the strength of the script, a friend of Louis B. Mayer's convinced him to buy the movie rights to On the Town for MGM before the show opened on Broadway. The preproduction deal brought in money that helped cover expenses, but Robbins had no hand in the 1949 movie starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin. Only four pieces from Bernstein's score were retained, and Comden and Green wrote new lyrics for far blander tunes by Roger Edens. The opening New York montage, with the sailors careering all over town, is terrific, but the choreographic inventiveness doesn't match Robbins's.

On the Town broke some long-standing Broadway traditions. The three women Gabey, Chip, and Ozzie meet aren't dewy ingenues or their stereotypical smart-mouthed, sourpuss girlfriends. They're independent in the way American women had learned to be in wartime. Tough, heart-of-gold Hildy (a part tailor-made for Nancy Walker) drives a cab and is uncompromising about refusing fares she doesn't like the look of and forthright about dragooning a guy she fancies (Chip). Claire de Loon, the intellectual of the trio, is an anthropologist with a runaway libido. Ivy Smith, the Miss Turnstiles whose poster Gabey falls in love with, supports her ballet and singing lessons by doing a cooch number at Coney Island. The casting wasn't entirely conventional either. Early on, the role of Ivy was given to Sono Osato, whom Robbins knew from Ballet Theatre. She had just won one of the first annual Donaldson Awards for best female dancer in a musical, One Touch of Venus. Reviewing the show, choreographed by Agnes de Mille and starring Mary Martin, Wolcott Gibbs had referred to Osato as "a marvelously limber girl of cryptic nationality, who led the dancers and alarmed and fascinated me almost unbearably." Perhaps it's fortunate that her nationality was "cryptic"; this gorgeous dancer cast as an all-American girl was half Japanese, and her father was currently interned in Chicago (the irony was not lost on Osato). In addition, the team wanted a cast that reflected the diversity of New York, so they hired four black singers and four black dancers and mixed them in with the rest of the cast, unheard of on Broadway at that time. Dorothy McNichols and Flash Reilly did an eye-catching jitterbug in the "Times Square Ballet" that ended Act I, but both McNichols and her friend Jean Handy (the little cousin Robbins had advised about a career in dance was in the chorus) say On the Town was the first integrated show on Broadway without the stereotypes and without a separation of black and white dancers.

The three buddies' search for Gabey's elusive Miss Turnstiles sends them running all over town, and in a sense, the city is the star of the show: its subways, its skyline, its nightclubs, Times Square, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Hall (all revealed through Smith's vivid drops and flats that skimmed in and out). Smith called On the Town "a valentine to New York." Even its history gets into the act; Chip (Cris Alexander) reels off from his antiquated guidebook the names of long-gone desirable places such as the Aquarium and the Hippodrome while Hildy jerks her cut-out taxi around, insisting, "Come to my place!"

Bernstein's score captured the stress and relentless speed of New York, its changing rhythms, its ongoing traffic and lit-up nights. Like Oklahoma!, the show begins on a quiet note. No singing-dancing chorus. Just one sleepy Navy Yard watchman with a formidable bass voice, stretching as he sings, "I feel like I'm not out of bed yet. (yawns) A-a-a-a-a-a-a-h." But when he finishes his brief song and a whistle blows, a flood of sailors catapults onstage, and by the time the three heroes have finished their song, the men of the dancing chorus are vaulting across the stage, one hand reaching up to grab the skyline.

New York, New York, a helluva town, The Bronx is up and the Battery's down. The people ride in a hole in the groun'. New York, New York, it's a helluva town!!

It's as if the shipboard pressure has been building up until, released, the men explode into life, avid to seize not just the day but the whole city.

Robbins, Bernstein, Comden, and Green, with Smith's input, managed to make the musical reflect everything that mattered to them. It was "symphonic" in its fusion of elements. Comden and Green, who'd been auditioning unsuccessfully for shows as performers, wrote for themselves the fat parts of Ozzie and Claire de Loon. Green's rumpled looks became fodder for the witty scene in which the anthropologist mistakes the sailor for a museum specimen of Pithecanthropus erectus and starts taking his measurements. Robbins's dances were a vital part of the action, justified by Times Square's madhouse of human traffic, slow drags in nightclubs, and Coney Island orientalism, and culminating in a dream ballet. Bernstein put almost everything he knew and loved about American popular music into the score: jazz licks, swing, blues, Gershwin, the big baritone aria that makes you think of Show Boat, a fox-trot rhythm here, a hint of square dance there. But the vivid musical gestures, surprising textures, complex harmonies, and unexpected rhythmic shifts come from Bernstein, the twentieth-century classical composer. What other Broadway music man of the day would have exploded his opening chorus into raucous counterpoint? Abbott teased him about "that Prokofieff stuff" in portions of the score but didn't cut a bar of it.

During a 1981 symposium on On the Town that brought the collaborators together, Bernstein made it clear just how cooperative the process of putting the show together had been:

[Jerry] would say, "As a practical matter, I've got to have four more bars here or I can't get my dancers from left to right and offstage," and I would say, "I can't do four more bars, that would just drag it out," and I would do four more bars, then it would usually turn out to be a better piece with the extra material, because Jerry's instincts are incredible, musically.

When the composer loathed what he'd written for "I Get Carried Away" ("this little polka-like cowboy tune. It wasn't like me"), it was Comden and Green who suggested he try it in the minor key: "Suddenly we had this operatic feeling which dictated the whole form of the number, the whole duet quality of those two quasi-operatic voices that brought down the house."

Robbins had never choreographed for so many dancers before, and Abbott's busy schedule allowed only two weeks for out-of-town tryouts (in the end, they had ten days).

Continues...

---

Excerpted from Jerome Robbins by Deborah Jowitt Copyright © 2004 by Deborah Jowitt. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---