Insiders say Arthur Laurents (center) resented the greater attention lavished on contemporaries such as Richard Rodgers (seated at piano) and Stephen Sondheim. (AP)
Arthur Laurents, who wrote “Gypsy” and “West Side Story,” called his gossipy, score-settling 2000 memoir “Original Story By.”
He might also have called it “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
Laurents, who died last week at 93, could be the greatest of friends — funny, generous and wise.
But when he turned on you — and, in his long life, he turned on many of his friends sooner or later — it was swift and brutal.
“When I read Arthur’s obituary, I thought of the dinners we had and the confidences we shared,” says composer Charles Strouse. “There was, at one point, a real camaraderie between us.”
But then they worked together on a show called “Nick & Nora” that flopped on Broadway in 1991, and Strouse met Mr. Hyde.
“He humiliated me in front of the cast, and he attacked my music in the most vicious and personal ways. I could never make sense of it, and it’s not fair to speculate. All I can say is that man who was my friend became a snarling beast.”
Strouse’s experience isn’t unique.
Matt Cavenaugh played Tony in the 2009 revival of “West Side Story,” which Laurents directed.
Cavenaugh was struggling with the role out of town, and several producers wanted to replace him. But Laurents protected him, and what sources described as a close friendship sprung up between them.
But when Cavenaugh announced he was getting married, Mr. Hyde raised his silver-tipped cane.
Laurents demanded that the actor cut short his honeymoon for “important rehearsals” that turned out to be routine. He also fired off e-mails saying Cavenaugh couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, and that his performance was ruining the show.
Cavenaugh eventually left the production.
Mary Rodgers, the daughter of Richard Rodgers, was close to Laurents for years. But they fell out around the time he published his 2000 memoir, in which he wrote about her father’s secret drinking.
When writer Jesse Green was doing a profile of Laurents for New York magazine, he called Rodgers for a quote.
Her now legendary response: “Call me back when he’s dead.”
(Many have, but she’s not talking.)
Being verbally set upon by Laurents was like dropping by for drinks at George and Martha’s house.
“He was one of those people who get more articulate the angrier they get,” says lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. “I get angry and start to blubber. He just got sharper and sharper, each sentence perfectly formed.”
Adds a producer: “He was funny as hell when he was mad at you. But he had a way of homing in on the thing you least wanted to hear in terms of your work or your personal life, and that’s what he hit you with.”
Here’s what Laurents told me when I asked him about Sam Mendes‘ flawed revival of “Gypsy.”
“You have to have musical theater in your bones, and Sam doesn’t. You can’t put it there. I know. I tried. I gave Sam many notes, but he just couldn’t do it. As they say in ‘Gypsy,’ ‘Either you got it or you don’t.’ And he don’t.”
(When Mendes read that quote, he was “in shock,” a source says.)
Where did this legendary vitriol come from?
In part, it was a response to the whimsical brutality of Broadway, where you can win a Tony one year and get kicked into the gutter the next.
Laurents, who had his share of flops, often called Broadway “Chernobyl.”
“Show business is savage, and Arthur savaged it before it could savage him,” says a friend. “Unfortunately, the ‘it’ was often a person.”
Laurents also despised hypocrisy.
He was openly gay most of his life, and he was vocal about his left-wing politics, even when many lefties were running for cover during the McCarthy era.
“Arthur called people out on hypocrisy all the time,” says a producer, who was close to him for years. “He prided himself on doing it. If you were offended, he’d say, ‘I’m just being honest.’
“The only way you could stand up to him was to call him out on something he did that was hypocritical. And to his credit, if you were right, he agreed.”
This producer, who asked not to be identified, recalls reading an article in which Laurents attacked one of his shows — a show Laurents hadn’t bothered to see.
“I called him and said, ‘If you ever say anything like that again, I’m going to call you out on it publicly,’ and I hung up on him. A few days later I saw him on the subway holding the Playbill from the show. He said, ‘I loathed it. But you were right. I should have seen it before I said anything.’
“And then he hugged me.”
Laurents’ caustic fury may also have been fueled by envy, friends say.
Not only did he write “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” they were his ideas.
But the credit went to his collaborators — Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim.
“They were the geniuses,” says a producer, “and Arthur was the craftsman. He was a brilliant writer, but I think it bothered him that he was never elevated as high as they were.”
That may be so.
But Laurents outlived most of them. And his brilliant revival of “Gypsy” — fueled, though it may have been, by envy — proved, in the end, that he was in their league.