Born On This Day- July 14th... Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents: "Writers are the chosen people. I am happiest when sitting alone & putting my daydreams & fantasies down on paper.”

As the story goes... late for his place on a panel discussion, Arthur Laurents burst on to the stage draped in mink & announced: "behold, a living legend!". Stephen Sondheim, also on the panel, looked up & said: "wrong on both counts".

I just ate up his memoirs- Original Story By & Mainly On Directing which were chock full of great dishy theatre & Hollywood stories. He is important to me in the many ways. I admire him & his work, but most especially because he wrote the book for my favorite musical- Gypsy!, which I find to be a near perfect piece of theatre. He directed 3 rivals of Gypsy! including my favorite version with my good close personal friend Angela Lansbury in 1974, &Tyne Daley revival in 1989 & the recent Patti Lupone outing.

In 2010, at 92, he directed a revival of West Side Story, a classic for which he wrote the original lean & strong book. In this production, it was Laurents's conceit to have most of the the Sharks & their girls, who are from Puerto Rico, speak & sing in Spanish & the cast would all be young & if not Puerto Rican, at least Hispanic. Laurents has explained that the idea came from his partner of 52 years- Tom Hatcher (Laurents & Farley Granger were lovers in the late 1940s), who saw & loved a production of the musical in South America. It was also Hatcher that urged Laurents to revive Gypsy! with Patti Lupone, so that the Sam Mendes directed production with Bernadette Peters would not be the last Gypsy! in Laurents's lifetime.

Laurents has won 4 Tony Awards & been nominated for 6 Oscars, winning for the screenplay of The Turning Point. He was by all accounts, a real son of a bitch... but, what a talent.

His career had barely started when he was drafted into the Army in 1941. Laurents spent the war years writing training films & radio propaganda shows.

He had also had come to terms with his homosexuality & soon lost count of the sexual experiences he had while in the Army. In Original Story By, he speaks of his lifetime of gay encounters, referring to his partners as “those unremembered hundreds.” As a gay man living as openly as possible during some of this country's most dangerous times, Laurents was a role model of discretion & living the way he wanted to, despite public opinion & cruelty against homosexuals everywhere.

The last line of Laurents's memoir- Original Story By, speaks of Tom Hatcher, who was Laurents' partner for more than 50 years: "As long as he lives, I will." But Hatcher died in 2006  & Laurents, in his 93rd year, adjusting to life without him. When they first became a couple, Laurents claims his mother was more disturbed that Hatcher was a gentile than that her son was gay.

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, & I'd go home to bed. I assumed everybody could do that. I was never one for going to bars, that kind of thing. I was a hopeless romantic. Well, no one could have that much sex & be entirely romantic, but the dangerous side never appealed to me."

But Hatcher was the great love of his life & their life together is one of the great love affairs.  From Laurents' memoirs:"Tom & theatre, that's what my life has been. & that's what my book is - an effort to say thank you by doing what I can to make the theatre indestructible & to keep Tom alive."

"From Tom's pool, you can see into the heart of his garden. 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 20 more years,' he assured me."


Laurents worked in many genres. The stage was his first love, & he wrote for it for 65 years, creating comedies, romances, & serious dramas that explored questions of ethics, social pressures & personal integrity.
 
 

 

Laurents made his exit, upstage center, in May of this year.

Librettos: Gypsy, Nick & Nora, West Side Story, The Madwoman of Central Park West, Hallelujah, Baby! Do I Hear a Waltz?, & Anyone Can Whistle

Direction: Anyone Can Whistle, La Cage aux Follies, The Madwoman of Central Park West, Gypsy (1974, 1989 & 2008), I Can Get It for You Wholesale (with a very young Barbra Streisand) & Invitation to a March


Plays: Invitation to a March, A Clearing in the Woods, The Time of the Cuckoo, The Bird Cage, Home of the Brave, & Jolson Sings!


Screenplays: Anastasia, The Turning Point, The Way We Were, Gypsy, West Side Story, Bonjour Tristesse, Summertime (from his play "The Time of the Cuckoo"), Anna Lucasta, Home of the Brave, Rope, Caught, & The Snake Pit

Has your life been touched by any of his work? I would be interested to know.
If you are a fan, what is your favorite version of Gypsy!?





It gets me every time...This is a partial list of Arthur Laurents's contribution to popular culture:

Born On This Day- July 1st... Farley Granger

He had a career on stage & screen from the early 1940s through the early aughts. Farley Granger is known best for starring in a pair of Alfred Hitchcock Films with legendary homosexual subtexts: Rope & Strangers on a Train.

His first starring role in They Live by Night, directed by bi-sexual Nicholas Ray, is considered to be one of his finest film performances. Granger’s sensitive portrayal of the bank robber Bowie caught the attention of Alfred Hitchcock. While preparing to shoot Rope a movie inspired by the notorious Leopold & Loeb murder case, Granger & co-star John Dall (whose homosexuality was also well known in the Hollywood community) were cast as a pair affluent young men, who set out to commit a " Prefect Murder".The men’s sexuality is never made explicit in the film, but the relationship between Granger’s & Dall’s characters has a strong homoerotic subtext, skillfully sewn together by Hitchcock & his actors. The film became notorious for it’s continuous, uninterrupted 10-minute takes, the amount of time a reel of Technicolor film lasted. It was a difficult feat as Hitchcock ran into numerous technical problems which frequently brought the action to a halt throughout the 21 day shoot.

 

3 years after starring in Rope, Granger again worked with Hitchcock in the classic thriller Strangers on a Train, based on the first novel by acclaimed lesbian writer Patricia Highsmith, who authored The Talented Mr. Ripley & a series of Ripley books. Although Hitchcock himself was dissatisfied with the end result, Strangers On A Train was a box office hit & the first major success of Granger’s career & is one of my favorite Hitchcock’s films.

Granger remained secretive about his private life, but his homosexuality has been widely known in the Hollywood & Broadway acting communities. Among his many lovers was Arthur Laurents who wrote the screenplay for Rope. Laurents speaks kindly of him in Laurents memoir- Original Story By. Granger had shorter affairs with Leonard Bernstein & Robert Walker, he remained friends with both of them until each of their deaths. In 1995 he was one of many on-screen actors interviewed for Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman’s ground-breaking documentary The Celluloid Closet, discussing the depiction of homosexuality in film, in particular Rope and Strangers on a Train.

Granger was a profoundly good looking actor of considerable range & style: Broadway, films, musicals, light comedies & noir. I found him to be the epitome of how to age with class. He was in a long domestic partnership with stage manager-  Robert Calhoun, who passed away on 2008. Together they had written Granger's dishy memoir, deliciously titled- Count Me Out. Granger died in the same week as Elizabeth Taylor this spring.

& The Curtain Falls... Arthur Laurents

He meant a great deal to me, one of my favorite show biz creatures: cranky, candid, & curt. He was part of the team that created my favorite musical, writing the book of Gypsy, one of the best librettos ever. It has character; it has a flavor of the period of the various theater styles of the time, a feeling of being transported back to the world of second-rate vaudeville & burlesque. It's amazing that the script actually does that. It is a great, great vehicle for a certain kind of actress, who is bigger than the sum of her parts.

He was the screenwriter of my favorite Hollywood Romance- The Way We Were, based on his own novel, which was based on his own life,with his long time partner Tom Hatcher as the Robert Redford character & Barbra Streisand as a stand in for himself.

I made note on this little spot on the Internet of news that Streisand wished to play Rose & direct a new film version of Gypsy. This spring Arthur Laurents’s had conversation with the musical's lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, that convinced him there shouldn't be another Gypsy movie. Laurnets: "He said, 'What is the point of it?' & I said, 'They have this terrible version with Rosalind Russell wearing those black & white shoes.' & then Sondheim told me something that he got from the British… & it's wonderful. He said, 'You want a record because the theater is ephemeral. But it's wrong. The theater's greatest essence is that it is ephemeral. You don't need a record. The fact that it's ephemeral means you can have different productions, different Roses on into infinity. So I don't want it now. I don't want a definitive record. I want it to stay alive."

He was role model to me in so many ways, he planned ahead for his death, giving directions to his agent Jonathan Lomma that when he died that he wanted it noted: "he was predeceased by his partner, Tom Hatcher, with whom he had lived in happiness for more than 50 years.”

In his engaging memoir from 2000- Original Story By, he was straightforward about his liaisons with gentlemen, referring to his partners as “those unremembered hundreds.... I think that people who are healthy have good sex, with a lot of variety to it."

Tom Hatcher, a former actor & real estate developer, would be his partner for 52 years. Hatcher died in 2006.

Laurents: “Writers are ‘the chosen people’ & I have been the happiest when sitting alone & putting my daydreams & fantasies down on paper.”

Laurents: "Gypsy is about the need for recognition. ... a need everyone has in one way or another."

I found him to be attractive, especially in his younger years, a small, compact man, like a cross between a Roman emperor on a coin & a hot gym teacher, difficult, diffident & Jewish… all plusses in my book.

Laurents:" They say I'm mean. They say this for 2 reasons. I I think too fast & I talk as fast as I think, & I'm often acerbic. But I say mean things as a defense. People who get their feelings hurt don't realize I have a very developed set of defenses. But also I will not suffer fools & amateurs. What that has cost me is a ... reputation. So?"

For more about his life, see my post on his birthday here.

He left this existence today at 93 years of age. He was still working up until March 2011.Mr. Laurents, I hope to see you at the big curtain call some day.