Phantom Does L.A. : Seductions Are Many for Broadway Star as Hit Show Returns Him to Hollywood

Michael Crawford is blushing.

But the color overtaking his complexion is not just the pale pink shade of modesty. Rather, this beet-red hue, which stretches from the bottom of his neck to the roots of his hairline, is a mark of unmitigated embarrassment.

That’s the Phantom of the Opera’s reaction to being called L.A.’s newest sex symbol.

He stutters. He sighs. He even shakes a little. Is this acting or is this real?

“So you say I could carry away any woman here who’s seen me perform. Well, um, er,” he hesitates, “I don’t have the strength to carry away a woman--unless she was very small.”

You’d think by now that someone who was the toast of London and New York and even Time magazine, who received 160 fan letters one week after his West Coast debut, who shed tears because his personal reviews were so good, could take a compliment with more aplomb than this .

Was in ‘Hello, Dolly!’

But despite his discomfort, Crawford, 47, knows that every night he succeeds in seducing Ahmanson Theater audiences is vindication for the humiliation that Hollywood handed him 23 years ago. At that time he landed the young lead in “Hello, Dolly!” and moved to Bel-Air, only to return to England a few failed film roles later without ever consummating his dream of an American movie career.

“You make a couple of bum movies, and for this town, that’s it. You don’t get another chance for a long time,” he explains without bitterness. “And I didn’t want to do things that would be more harmful than what I’d felt I’d done to myself already by then.”

Now, Hollywood is trying again to tempt him with movie deals, and Crawford’s agents at International Creative Management are fielding dozens of interested calls. Even the Phantom himself can’t keep from boasting that next week he’s taking a meeting with two of the town’s most dynamic film makers--Walt Disney Co.’s Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

“I’m only now becoming fully aware of ‘Phantom’s’ impact here. And it’s woooooooonderful . I just want to stretch that word around the moon when I say it. That’s how excited I am by all this,” Crawford gushes. “Now I can say honestly that I don’t miss not having had a Hollywood career. What could I have that’s bigger than ‘Phantom’? I couldn’t have hoped for anything more in my life professionally.”

With that, his blue eyes lose their sincerity and take on a slyness. And he leans forward and whispers sensually into his interviewer’s ear.

“But, of course, if you hear of anyone in Hollywood with a good part for me, please have them leave their phone numbers at the stage door. And I will contact them immediately.”

So, like other L.A. luminaries, Crawford must be doing the town in style, getting the best tables at Spago, living in sumptuous elegance at the Beverly Wilshire, driving around in a Ferrari Testarossa. Right?

Wrong.

“All you do is go out there and try to climb that mountain every night and get to the top. And when you come forward, the audience applauds. And that’s it. That’s your moment. And then it’s ‘Good night, everyone. See you tomorrow.’ And you go home and go to bed.”

Not Having Fun

But even when he’s not giving one of his eight weekly performances (he almost never misses one, performing even with minor illnesses), it doesn’t seem like he’s having much fun.

“You want to know about the life of a so-called star?” He laughs. “There’s so much smog coming in through the windows that it’s spent with a feather duster, in the laundry room and with the vacuum cleaner on my days off, because I can’t find help. Though I don’t know if I should say that,” he adds, nervous now, “because I’ll probably get some offers!”

Yes, the L.A. Phantom is living most unglamorously in a downtown apartment as the quintessential divorced dad (his two daughters are in England), because he’s more comfortable that way than in a hotel. “I’m the independent sort. I like looking after things,” he says, even though that meant eating a cold Christmas dinner alone in Manhattan in 1987 because the oven in the place where he was staying wouldn’t work.

“Nobody’s actually offered to come to supper with me after reading that story,” he laments.

When he doesn’t have to be up too early the next day, he gets into his Toyota Cressida and finds a friend and tries to dine somewhere cheap on the Westside. “But it’s very hard for me to get a table in a restaurant,” he complains. “I end up being mistaken for the waiter, and somebody asks me to get them a drink when I walk in. So I don’t make a big impression.”

Unfortunate Reception

So far, at least, he’s a frequent customer at Pane Caldo in Beverly Hills. “I’ve established a stronghold there. I get a table, and they’re really nice.”

But he didn’t get a pleasant reception at a West Hollywood cafe recently. “I rang up and booked a table for two one Sunday and there was a long pause before they said, ‘Yes, I think we can fit you in.’ And, when I got there, we were the only two people in the restaurant. So maybe they were waiting for all those customers to fly on in.”

Because of the heavy makeup he wears as the Phantom (it takes two hours to apply), whose disfigurements hide Crawford’s own classic features, the actor is able to walk around Los Angeles without being recognized. “Still, I think, ‘Well, you never know. Maybe people have seen the news by now.’ But obviously they haven’t because they don’t have the faintest idea who I am. And now that my publicist has put together a 45-minute tape of the TV coverage of “Phantom” here for me to watch, I could take a copy of it into restaurants and while I’m waiting for a table ask, ‘Do you have a VCR? I just want to see some of my reviews!’ ”

Most of the time, though, Crawford cooks for himself--mostly meatless, low-fat meals that adhere to the special diet he’s devised to control his hiatal hernia.

But after every performance, the first thing Crawford does is reach for a pint of Guinness stout “because I think it gives me iron--and I’m sticking to that story.”

He has even made an arrangement with the Guinness company to make sure he has a continuous supply in Los Angeles--though someone should tell him the ale can be bought at the local market.

He eschews L.A.’s penchant for fitness trainers, preferring to work out on his own. “It’s cheaper,” he declares. In fact, Crawford is getting more exercise than usual scrambling up and down the stage in his Phantom role because the Ahmanson Theater is taller than either of its previous venues--in London and New York.

“I lean out further, and I climb higher and I stand right on the edge of the rail,” Crawford boasts. “(Director) Hal Prince closes his eyes when I do that. But I like to put myself through such a workout. And as I lean over at the end, you can see on the curtain calls that the sweat’s just pouring out of the bald cap I’ve got on.”

In fact, Crawford gained 10 pounds after his New York run was over, “and it frightened me a bit when I put it on.” But, within three days after performing “Phantom” in Los Angeles, he’d lost every ounce, and now his civilian costume--a typically British tweed jacket, pastel silk shirt and gray flannel slacks--hangs looser than he would like.

Even so, he’s not nearly as skinny--nor as blond--as when he first performed in public as a choirboy at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and as a boy-soprano chimney sweep in Benjamin Britten’s “Let’s Make an Opera” in 1957.

By 19, Crawford was cast as Hero in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” his first major American movie (filmed in Spain), which started him on a long succession of comedic ingenue roles. In 1962, when he made his stage debut in Neil Simon’s “Come Blow Your Horn” in the West End of London, audiences were charmed by his physical clowning.

By the mid-1960s, Crawford was a veteran of several films, including a starring role in “How I Won the War” with Beatle John Lennon. During the filming, they shared a house in Spain where Crawford watched in awe one day while Lennon wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever” sitting cross-legged on the floor.

But “Hello, Dolly!” in 1969 was his first singing-and-dancing role. And he had to play an American, which he wasn’t. But legendary dancer Gene Kelly worked with the young actor and got him into shape for the role--which is why, for his L.A. debut, Crawford made a special point of inviting Kelly as his special guest. “I wouldn’t be doing what I am today, or have done since, without his help,” Crawford notes. “Because I was very introverted in a way, and he gave me the belief in myself that you need to become a performer.”

After a 20-minute screen test, Crawford was hired and given equal billing with Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau. “I mean, there was no justification for this. But I had completely bamboozled the executive producer, Roger Eames. He said: ‘What we’re looking for is an attractive idiot. And my wife thinks you’re attractive, and I think you’re an idiot.’ ”

After appearing in lackluster films such as “The Games” and “Hello Goodbye,” Crawford returned to England where he triumphed for the next 20 years in comedic roles on the stage in the West End and in a hugely popular British television series.

And there he remained--virtually forgotten by Hollywood--until his “Phantom” triumph on Broadway, which he says was just as unexpected as his early success in “Hello Dolly!”

“Maybe someone was smiling over me,” Crawford explains. “Because, again, there was no earthly reason why someone would cast me as the Phantom. It’s a flattering thing to have happen. And both times it worked out a treat.”

Crawford was starring on the London stage in “Barnum” when Andrew Lloyd Webber first mentioned to him that “he was going to do this new project and maybe I’d be interested. And I said I’d love to--and I didn’t hear another thing for a year and half.”

But on the day that Crawford announced he was quitting “Barnum,” Webber showed up and asked him to listen to some music.

Webber played the overture of “Phantom of the Opera” for Crawford, who had only to hear 12 bars before he knew it was his. “Within 45 seconds, I knew how to stand, I knew the look of the man, and I knew I wanted to do it. It sounds silly now, but it was just like someone had entered my body. That character was saying, ‘Here I am. I’m waiting for you.’ ”

These days, it is audiences who wait anxiously for Crawford, who as the Phantom is on stage for a mesmerizing 30 minutes of singing, sauntering, slaughtering and seducing.

With his high singing voice and comedic background, Crawford was far from the obvious choice to play the ghoul of the Paris Opera House. And yet, the Tony Award-winning actor knows that by playing the role in London, New York and now Los Angeles, and possibly Australia in the future, he has made it uniquely his own.

So much so, he notes with undisguised glee, that when the Center Theatre Group’s volunteers recently invited him to speak at one of their meetings, he was more warmly received than Christopher Reeve. “So the Phantom was more popular than Superman, and I don’t even wear my knickers on the outside,” Crawford laughs.

To hear him talk about playing the role, the Phantom’s sensuality just seems to come naturally to him. “Really, I’m not actually aware that women react like that. Because you don’t hear the talk at intermission. You don’t hear the talk in the ladies’ washroom. You don’t hear the talk after the show. But it’s understandable, I suppose, because we wanted to make him sort of a masked Valentino. But, instead of jumping in and out of everyone’s window, he’s just in one window. He has just one love. And that’s the ultimate seduction, I guess.”

And Crawford has shown himself to be the ultimate seducer, no matter that he’s playing a horribly disfigured and devilishly determined killer.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. Honestly. Like when I run my hands over my hair, people say, ‘Oh, that’s very seductive.’ But the reason I did that at first was because I’d taken my hat off and we were always worried it would upset the wig and the mask. And I said, ‘All right, I’ll straighten it,’ so I just went like that with my hands one day. And Gillian Lynne, the choreographer, said, ‘Oh my gawd . Darling, do that again for me.’

“And I said, ‘What? Is my hair still upset?’

“And she said, ‘No, just do that again-- slow -ly.’ ”

So you tell him that when he made that gesture at a performance recently, a woman in the audience sighed, “Oh, my,” prompting her jealous husband to respond, “So, you like him, huh?”

“Then I’m going to come out there one night, and I’ll just keep walking,” Crawford pledges. “I mean, if Christine rejects me, sod it, I’m going to go straight out into the audience.”

With that, he blows you a kiss--and is gone.