The Musical Man

Most sensible babies deal with the tricky business of birth by crying. Miles Kreuger came out singing.

“I was born a Gilbert and Sullivan fan,” says the irrepressible music lover. “I think I popped out of the womb and sang ‘My Eyes Are Fully Opened to My Awful Situation’ from ‘Ruddigore.’ ”

You want “Ruddigore”? Try the library of Kreuger’s rambling 17-room Los Angeles duplex, where he guards a 60-year-old recording by G&S;’ original London producers, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, on 78 rpm. Too low-tech for you? A few more recent CD versions are tucked away in his study.

Not to mention every Broadway cast album as well as musical comedy recordings stretching back to the 1890s; Broadway playbills and record catalogs that are even older; more than 200,000 movie stills, some more than 80 years old; and perhaps the country’s most extensive collection of sheet music from American film and stage musicals.

All of which are cataloged in Kreuger’s head.

“I am the card system,” Kreuger, 61, says cheerily. “There’s a race between getting the whole thing onto a computer and my becoming senile, and so far I’m winning.”

Bravo.

It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that Kreuger curates the Institute of the American Musical, the country’s largest library devoted to that quintessentially American art form--and, by the way, Kreuger’s humble home. He is the institute, which in theory would make it difficult to take a vacation.

“I’ve never had a vacation in my whole life, because I don’t understand the importance of them,” muses Kreuger, sipping herbal tea in the dining room, surrounded by every Broadway cast album ever issued. “I really like what I’m doing, so why would I want to be taken away from it? When I was really bad [as a youth], which wasn’t very often, the biggest punishment was to take me to the country for a weekend. I would sit there and watch bugs, and it was just boring, bugs, everything with a B.”

Kreuger’s devotion to musicals inspires awe in his admirers, who have watched his collection billow neatly over into the laundry room (back copies of Theatre Arts magazine) and the bedroom (the silver boudoir mirror of turn-of-the-century Broadway star Anna Held and half the cigar smoked by Orson Welles in Henry Jaglom’s 1987 film “Someone to Love”--in which Kreuger played a theater attendant).

“When Orson Welles was in the middle of a scene he did for this movie,” says longtime friend Jaglom, “Miles started whispering something to me. I said, ‘Not now, Miles. I’m directing Orson.’ He was getting agitated and after the scene, he said, ‘That ashtray. Orson put his cigar out in that ashtray. Do you think it would be all right if I asked him for it?’ ‘What for?’ ‘It’s Orson Welles, the cigar he smoked in “Someone to Love.” ’

“He made history out of the moment. I don’t know another human being to whom it would occur the second Orson put down this cigar to hold onto it for historical purposes. It seemed very strange and touching and magically bizarre.”

And extremely thorough, to say the least.

“He has this incredible collection of everything,” says musical producer Corky Hale, wife of legendary songwriter Mike Stoller whose repertoire is being belted out on Broadway in “Smokey Joe’s Cafe.” “You call Miles and say, ‘Gertrude Lawrence sang a song in 19-whatever,’ and he has it. The man is a walking genius encyclopedia. We just can’t lose that and I live in fear that I’ll read it’s gone up in flames.”

Hale wants to help Kreuger found a support group for the institute, which Kreuger dreams about relocating to an actual library. But mostly, the institute is desperate for funds, getting by on sporadic donations and on Kreuger’s singular passion for musicals.

“In nonmusical theater, the curtain went up and you saw people behaving more or less in the way they behave in real life,” Kreuger says. “But in musicals reality was heightened, and when people expressed an emotion that could no longer be expressed in dialogue, they would start to sing. And if that emotion continued to heighten, they had to burst into dance. It was like an expression of a larger emotion, a more exalted emotion than could be expressed in mere dialogue.

“That fascinated me, and also as an American I was very proud to think that we had created and honed to its highest level the American musical theater. . . . That thrilled me. We did musicals better than anybody else. And people simply were not taking musicals seriously.

“In the introduction to my book on ‘Show Boat’ [Oxford University Press, 1977], I said that when I was in college I said to my teachers that in 25 years people would be more interested in Cole Porter than in Maxwell Anderson. I still feel that’s true. And it’s our creation.”

*

Before there was Miles Kreuger, there were Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, who romanced each other in the 1932 film “A Farewell to Arms.” Fortunately for Miles, so did his parents on a date at the cinema.

“I’m the product of ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ which I find rather extraordinary considering I don’t think it’s a very good movie at all,” he sniffs. “I’d rather be the product of a better picture.”

Alas. Tiny Miles’ own first love affair was with the hefty 78 rpms he would plop onto the family’s 1936 Philco phonograph that was taller than his 3-year-old self. By 4, he knew “HMS Pinafore” by rote. A fledgling New Yorker, he’d already attended a Carnegie Hall concert featuring his hero, Rachmaninoff, so Kreuger’s grandmother figured her grand tyke qualified for admission to his first Broadway show, “Knights of Song,” which told the tale of his other heroes, Gilbert and Sullivan. Not that other theatergoers were equally convinced of the boy’s audience worthiness.

“I didn’t like the fact that there was a curtain because there was no curtain at Carnegie Hall, and I thought they were hiding something. That made me very nervous. And then I kept asking Grandma all kinds of questions, and there was a woman sitting in front of her on the aisle.

“The woman turned around and saw me at the age of 4 1/2, and she said, ‘The idea of taking a child that age to the theater, why all he’ll do is talk and talk.’ And I leaned forward and I said,” Kreuger narrows his voice into a hiss, “ ‘Look who’s talking.’ ”

An aesthete is born.

That performance also etched Kreuger’s ambition to follow in the footsteps of actor Nigel Bruce, who roared down a theater aisle and tromped up onstage, where he “directed” a dress rehearsal of “HMS Pinafore.”

“I was mesmerized. I thought if he can walk up the steps and become one of them maybe someday I can walk up those steps and become one of them too.”

He couldn’t, as it turned out.

Kreuger almost created the role of Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Eliza Doolittle’s would-be beau in “My Fair Lady.” After studying drama at New York’s Bard College, he got a gofer’s job in the office of Herman Levin, who’d produced “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” on Broadway. Levin had a peculiar idea about producing a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” and Kreuger’s English schoolboy good looks--not to mention proximity--were irresistible lures to Allan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe as they shaped the songs for the new musical. But Kreuger was too hobbled by stage fright to take his bow, so the part went to someone else.

“It’s now a fact, you see, so it’s hard to know if it’s a regret,” Kreuger says matter-of-factly. “It was certainly a regret then, and I was angry at myself for being so cowardly.”

Meanwhile, Kreuger’s taste for the archival life was growing. At the tender age of 10, he’d already met his mentor, Iris Barry, who’d founded the Museum of Modern Art’s film archive. Kreuger had caught her eye when he became a regular at MoMA film screenings. One day, Berry approached him.

“She said to me, ‘May I ask you a question?’ In those days everyone talked to me as if I were an adult. Now they don’t necessarily do that but they did that then. And she said, ‘I see you here day after day taking notes in the darkened theater. Why is it that you’re not out playing baseball instead of looking at old movies?’ And I said, ‘Because I hate baseball and I love old movies.’ ”

Barry liked that answer so much she seated him next to D.W. Griffith at a screening of “Birth of a Nation.” By 15, Kreuger had also burrowed a perch in Lincoln Center’s performing arts library. And he’d infiltrated the Lambs and the Players, becoming a mascot of sorts for those private clubs for actors.

“All these young guys would stand around, shooting pool at the Lambs Club and I remember them smoking big cigars and trying to impress each other about how they were going to be discovered next season on Broadway, and they didn’t mean anything to me. What meant something to me was looking at that little old man in the corner nursing a cold cup of coffee and reading the crumpled New York Times because he looked interesting. And he was old. He knew something, not like these kids.

“So my sense of the past was expanding because the past didn’t seem so long ago. I knew living people by the dozens who had participated in 19th-century theater. Which seems, I must say, rather startling considering I’m sitting here in 1996 at the age of only 61, which isn’t much, and in perfect health, and it’s the end of the 20th century and I remember people who were on stage more than 100 years ago.”

Theater people sensed Kreuger’s passion and starting giving him playbills and scripts. One of his most cherished possessions is the original script for “Show Boat,” a gift from Oscar Hammerstein on Aug. 3, 1960, 20 days before his death.

“Up until that time, if you wanted to do ‘Show Boat’ you had to do a revised version because over the years it kept getting changed and altered and revised. So if you were as rich as King Farouk you still couldn’t do ‘Show Boat’ as done in 1927 because nobody had the original script. He had the only copy and then he gave it to me.

“He sensed that I cared. I escorted him down the steps of his townhouse carrying his luggage when I noticed how thin and gaunt he looked. His wife, Dorothy, got into [her side of] the car, he got into the sidewalk side and rolled down the window and extended his hand and stared at me with his big, milky gray eyes. And he said, ‘You’re going to be writing about the American musical, aren’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘I want you to make me a promise,’ holding my hand as tightly as a vise. ‘I want you to promise that you will always tell the truth no matter who it hurts.’ And I thought at the time what an odd request, and so I said, ‘Of course.’ ”

Later, operating on some uncanny instinct, Kreuger found the original orchestrations, which were thought to be lost, in the Rodgers and Hammerstein warehouse in New York.

“I’d never been there before. As if I had been led by a divining rod, I walked through this maze. I stopped and looked up at the very high ceiling, and there were three boxes that were unmarked and I said, ‘We’ve got to look in there.’ [The original orchestrator of ‘Show Boat’] Robert Russell Bennett opened the first carton and screamed, ‘Eureka!’ ”

Kreuger, tired of New York and with a Rockefeller Foundation grant of $25,000, moved the collection to Los Angeles in 1979. In typical Kreuger-esque impassioned fashion, he moved it himself by truck. In a traumatic twist, the truck turned over in the Mojave Desert, breaking phonographs and other treasures.

The surviving pieces and constantly growing collection are now tidily--and uniquely--arranged in cluttered but chronological order.

“This has got to be the only library in the world where everything is arranged chronologically,” Kreuger says. “But I’m interested in seeing how art evolves, how life evolves.”

Indeed, he has high hopes for his own, looking to the legendary producer George Abbott as his role model in longevity.

“He was as sharp as a tack. He was 107 when he died. Forty-six more years to go. Maybe I’ll get the dining room table cleared up by then. Either that or it’ll turn to mulch.”