The news that a major star is coming to Broadway rarely causes a stir these days.
Right now you can see a bunch of them — Daniel Radcliffe (“How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”), Kiefer Sutherland (“That Championship Season”), Chris Rock (“The Motherf – – -er With the Hat”).
But in 1981, when Broadway was pitifully short on star power, Elizabeth Taylor’s debut in “The Little Foxes” was a sensation.
Taylor, who died last week, was only 49 at the time, and though her movie career was on the wane, she still held the public’s imagination.
Fifteen years earlier, when her then-husband, Richard Burton, was starring in “Hamlet,” 5,000 people mobbed the stage door each night to catch a glimpse of the world’s most glamorous couple.
Now it was her turn onstage.
A chance encounter with Broadway producer Zev Bufman led to “The Little Foxes.” He was at a revival of “Brigadoon” in Washington, DC, and the theater manager asked him if a “senator’s wife” could sit next to him. As the lights went down, Taylor, who was married to Sen. John Warner, took her seat.
During the intermission, he asked her why she’d never been on Broadway.
“Because I’ve never been asked,” she replied.
Bufman, an old-fashioned showman, grabbed his golden opportunity.
“Whatever you want to do, I’ll produce it,” he said.
A few days later she rang him up and said she’d just read “The Little Foxes,” Lillian Hellman’s melodrama about a back-stabbing Southern family, and thought she could pull it off.
The limited run sold out the day it was announced. Ghoulish fascination fueled the demand for tickets.
Her marriage to Warner was whispered to be on the rocks. A source who worked on the show says that while they cooed for the photographers, in private “they bickered like George and Martha in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ ”
At a fashion show a few days before her Broadway debut, Taylor and Warner were drinking Champagne.
He grimaced and said, “What kind of Champagne is this?”
She shot back: “Don’t pull that elitist crap on me, baby. You’ll drink your Champagne and like it.”
No slouch in the drinking department herself, she’d gained so much weight that John Belushi was playing her on “Saturday Night Live.”
There was, in short, a very good chance that this Hollywood icon would fall flat on her double chin.
But she pulled it off.
She shed 20 pounds and made her entrance to rapturous applause. When she trotted across the stage wearing a chemise that allowed her famously ample breasts to bounce up and down, the crowd roared.
Frank Rich called her performance a “black and thunderous storm that may just knock you out of your seat.”
The cast, including the great Maureen Stapleton, adored her.
Jon Wilner, who designed the ad campaign, says Taylor told him: “Never run an ad without Maureen’s name in it, because she’s the theater artist and I’m just a guest in this town.”
Taylor was nominated for a Tony but lost to Jane Lapotaire, the star of “Piaf.”
She got a huge, if unintended, laugh at the Tonys when she called theater owner James Nederlander “James Needleheimer.”
He laughed loudest, and they became good friends.
Alas, Taylor was unable to repeat her triumph. A few years after “The Little Foxes,” she starred opposite Richard Burton in “Private Lives.” It closed after 63 performances.
“You couldn’t go near her on that show,” says Wilner. “She’d been so gracious in ‘The Little Foxes,’ and now she was so distant.
“I asked Zev what the difference was. And he said, ‘Richard Burton’s around, and it drives her crazy.’ “