Arthur Laurents lived in a West Village townhouse for 50 years. A year after his death, the contents of his home — furniture, set and costume designs, memorabilia and more — are up for auction tomorrow. (
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I first met Arthur Laurents, who died a year ago, in 1994 at his elegant townhouse on St. Luke’s Place in the West Village.
I was making a “Theater Talk” program about composer Jule Styne, with whom Laurents wrote “Gypsy.”
Laurents recalled the day he looked out his living room window and saw Styne bustling down St. Luke’s Place, throwing glances over his shoulder. The pint-size composer hustled up the stairs of No. 9 and pounded on the door. Laurents opened it, and Styne yelled: “In, in!”
He slammed the door and told Laurents to “get down, get down!”
They crawled over to the window and peered out from behind a curtain just as two beefy men came huffing and puffing down the street. They worked for a bookie to whom Styne, an inveterate gambler, was in hock.
“They ran right past my house,” Laurents recalled, “and when the coast was clear, Jule sat down at the piano and we went to work on ‘Hallelujah, Baby!’ ”
I always think of that story when I stroll past the house. I thought of it again the other day at the Roland Auction House on East 11th Street, where I was surrounded by the contents of 9 St. Luke’s Place.
David Saint, Laurents’ close friend and literary executor, has decided to sell the townhouse and much that was in it, including furniture, paintings, books and memorabilia. The auction begins at 11 a.m. tomorrow.
(Laurents’ personal papers, including manuscripts, letters and record albums, have been given to the Library of Congress.)
If I remember correctly, Laurents, who also wrote the book for “West Side Story” and directed “La Cage aux Folles,” bought the 19th-century house in about 1960 for something like $60,000.
Word is that Nathan Rothschild, who owns the house next door, has bought it and plans to combine the two. The price is said to be $9 million.
Proceeds from the sale of the house and Laurents’ estate will go to the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation, a charitable trust that supports new plays. (Tom Hatcher was Laurents’ lover until his death in 2006. Their ashes are buried by a bench in Quogue, LI, where they had a beach house.)
Laurents had a collection of crystal paperweights — Tiffany, Steuben, Baccarat — representing his shows. Each is expected to fetch between $200 and $500.
I may bid for the paperweight from “Nick & Nora.” That was the last musical Laurents wrote. It was a painful flop that drove him from Broadway for many years. He thought he could fix it by cutting out Asta, the dog.
Laurents had an eye for fine American furniture. Two cockfighting chairs from the 18th century are expected to go for at least $5,000 each.
Of particular interest to theater buffs will be the collection of original costume and set designs. There’s a gorgeous drawing by designer Theoni V. Aldredge of a Cagelle in white coattails from “La Cage.”
“The Single Earring was a Fabulous Idea!” Aldredge wrote on the drawing. (Expected price: $2,500).
A charming sketch of a costume from “Hallelujah, Baby!” signed by Irene Sharaff should go for $400. Robert Randolph’s set designs for the 1974 revival of “Gypsy” starring Angela Lansbury are on the block, as are Oliver Smith’s set designs for Laurents’ 1957 play “A Clearing in the Woods.”
Laurents collected 18th-century needlepoint samplers, though no one knows why.
“Is it something he picked up during his Navy days?” one friend wonders with a chuckle.
“I saw him use needles, but never for crocheting,” another friend says, referring to Laurents’ penchant for torturing actors who didn’t give him the performance he wanted.
There are several first editions, including Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” though most are without dust jackets, which knocks at least $2,000 off the value. You can also pick up a signed “Hot Seat,” a collection of Frank Rich’s New York Times reviews. It’s inscribed “To Arthur and Tom — Meeting you is one of the great joys of my post-critic career.”
I might buy that door-stopper of a book and put the “Nick & Nora” paperweight on top of it.
“There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that the liveliest thing in ‘Nick & Nora’ is a corpse,” Rich wrote.
Those who were fans of Sam Mendes’ misguided revival of “Gypsy” in 2003 — hello, Ben Brantley! — can bid on Laurents’ leather-bound script, inscribed by Bernadette Peters.
As it happens, while I was poking around the Laurents bric-a-brac, a “Mrs. Peters” called the auction house to check what time the online bidding starts.
“It was her!” said an excited auction-house official. “I recognized the voice!”
Maybe she wants to bid on a Tiffany lunch box Laurents received on the opening night of the acclaimed 2008 revival of “Gypsy” he directed.
It was a gift from — Patti LuPone.