The late, great Peter Stone, who wrote such shows as “1776” and “The Will Rogers Follies,” loved a good anecdote, and one of his favorites was about the 1983 Tony Awards.
Stone had been nominated for his book to “My One and Only,” a charming Gershwin catalog show starring Tommy Tune and Twiggy.
The competition that year, he said, wasn’t too stiff: Betty Comden and Adolph Green were in the running for “A Doll’s Life,” a flop; and Richard Levinson and William Link were up for “Merlin,” another flop.
The fourth nominee was T.S. Eliot, whose “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” was the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats.”
Since Eliot died in 1965, Stone didn’t see him as much of a threat either.
“If ever there was a sure thing that year, I was it,” Stone once told me.
As the nominees for Best Book of a Musical were being called out, Stone adjusted his bow tie, slicked down his hair and quickly went through his acceptance speech in his head.
When he heard the words “and the 1983 Tony Award goes to . . . ” he stood up and began making his way down the aisle.
“T.S. Eliot — ‘Cats’!”
He froze, and then slowly backtracked to his seat.
“I lost to a man who’d been dead for 18 years,” Stone said. “But I should have realized something was up when I saw Eliot’s widow sitting on the other side of the theater. The Shuberts would never have flown her over if they didn’t think they were going to win!”
That night, Valerie Eliot accepted the Tony on behalf of her husband.
“Tonight’s honor would have given my husband particular pleasure,” said his widow, who died Nov. 9, “because he loved the theater.”
(Eliot and Lloyd Webber also won the award that year for Best Score.)
“She was a lovely woman,” says Philip J. Smith, the head of the Shubert Organization. “But after the Tonys, we never saw her again. She retreated into the quiet world she had made for herself in England. I think she had enough of the stars!”
She must have been busy, though, in that “quiet world” — busy counting all the money that rolled in from “Cats.”
A fierce protector of her husband’s work, she rarely granted permission for his poems to be quoted at length. Even the noted historian Peter Ackroyd was allowed to quote only a few lines here and there in his 1984 biography of Eliot.
But Valerie Eliot liked the idea of a children’s musical based on her husband’s poems. She also liked the three dynamic young men who were going to create it — Lloyd Webber, director Trevor Nunn and producer Cameron Mackintosh.
“They were very enthusiastic,” she once said.
So she decided to give them the rights to “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” Mackintosh had trouble raising the money for the show. One of his longtime backers told him, “It’ll never work — England is a nation of dog lovers!”
Lloyd Webber mortgaged his house to complete the financing.
The show, as we know, worked pretty well.
Worldwide, “Cats” has grossed $3.5 billion. Since Eliot is both book writer and lyricist, his estate, industry insiders estimate, has taken in nearly $100 million.
Valerie Eliot used a chunk of the money to create the Old Possum’s Practical Trust, which supports universities and libraries throughout England. She also established the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; each year, the winner receives $30,000.
Valerie Eliot was no bystander in the creation of “Cats.” In fact, Nunn and Lloyd Webber say she was instrumental in giving them the character at the emotional center of the show.
Very late into rehearsals, Lloyd Webber and Nunn were still trying to find something to bind the songs and the poems together. One day Valerie came to rehearsal and handed them a “a crumpled and grubby piece of typing paper,” Nunn once recalled. On it, T.S. Eliot had written eight lines about a faded and lonely cat named Grizabella, the “Glamour Cat.”
T.S. Eliot hadn’t included Grizabella in the published poems because he thought she would be too upsetting to children.
Grizabella and her journey to the “heaviside layer” became the crux of “Cats,” inspiring Lloyd Webber to write his most celebrated song, “Memory” — yet another nice little earner for the estate of T.S. Eliot.