America, the Musical

E.L. Doctorow, the novelist, settled into an undersized chair at the Rose Cafe in Greenwich Village. He ordered coffee. He tidied his old-fashioned Bolshevik goatee with a quick sweep of the hand. And then he smiled like a man who savors his mischief, be it literary, personal or, in this case, promotional.

“I guess you heard they got their noses all out of joint about this,” he begins conspiratorially. “They” are the public relations people who have organized the super-hype around “Ragtime,” a new musical based on Doctorow’s 1975 best-selling novel about America at the turn of the century. And “this” is this interview that was arranged--not by the official arrangers who are preparing for “Ragtime’s” opening June 15 at the Shubert Theatre--but by the novelist himself.

“When I mentioned it, they said, ‘Whoops, we have to check this out,’ ” he continued, laughing silently, “and so I said, ‘Go ahead.’ ” He shrugged, making it clear that he had agreed to talk and therefore he would talk--about “Ragtime,” the novel, and “Ragtime,” the new musical, about writing and teaching, about historical fiction and fictional history.

“I think what has been created here, well, it is just amazing,” he says of the musical now playing in Toronto. “But I must admit that it was not my idea to do this.”

Doctorow had not been happy about an earlier adaptation of the book in a 1981 movie directed by Milos Forman. The problem for Doctorow’s “Ragtime” is that even though it is easy to read, it is not a simple story. The lives of three fictional families in turn-of-the-century New York are interwoven with the stories of real figures like Houdini, the illusionist; Emma Goldman, the feminist radical; and Henry Ford. “Ragtime” also touches on the big issues of the day like immigration, unionism, racism and automation. It is a tapestry, Doctorow likes to say. If you pull out too many threads, it disintegrates.

So when Canadian producer Garth Drabinsky (“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Show Boat”) made his pitch in 1994 to create this musical, Doctorow wanted to make certain that the production was true to the book. He listened to Drabinsky over a long lunch at Manhattan’s Russian Tea Room before he agreed to negotiate.

“I instinctively understood from the first approaches to me that Drabinsky really understood the book and was quite serious about mounting a show of real substance,” Doctorow says.

Still, he wanted more than appreciation of his work. He wanted some control over the show, especially if it would have his name on it.

“I made certain conditions before going ahead, and one was that I would have approval of the creative people--the librettist, the lyricist, composer, director. I felt that would give me some protection,” he says.

The first choice was apparently easy: Writer Terrence McNally (“Master Class,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!”) won immediate approval from both Drabinsky and Doctorow. The composers and lyricists auditioned for the job--Drabinsky invited 10 teams; eight produced their versions of “Ragtime.” From their tapes, Drabinsky and Doctorow chose lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty, a young duo whose previous work had included “Once on This Island” and “My Favorite Year.” For director, they picked Frank Galati, who specialized in dramatic adaptations of such classics as Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” a production of which had impressed Doctorow when he saw it at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

“I have participated at every step of the way,” Doctorow says now, noting that one song has been dropped at his urging and some “fine-tuning” is still being done in Toronto before the production moves to Century City.

Drabinsky, reached in Toronto at a “Ragtime” rehearsal, said that he “willingly” gave Doctorow approval over the creative team. Beyond that, he sought out the writer’s views, comments and suggestions at every stage of the production. As Drabinsky says: “I always looked at Edgar from the beginning as a collaborator.”

Some of Doctorow’s suggestions were taken, he says, but at other times the novelist’s ideas were “frankly, just wrong, mostly because of his inexperience with musical theater,” Drabinsky says now.

“But I liked his feistiness, and I liked the fact that he was always looking at us with a critical eye,” Drabinsky adds. “He was always pushing us, compelling us to rise to another level of our creative work.

“And, really, in the end if he wasn’t ultimately happy with it, what’s the point? I didn’t want a disgruntled writer going around for three years being unhappy while this show was going on stage.

“I wanted him to be pleased. I wanted to be the student, and I wanted him to be the teacher. I wanted to be the student who pleased the teacher. I have tremendous, reverential respect for him.”

Such talk might sound like little more than a producer’s pre-show hype except that Edgar Laurence Doctorow, now 66, does actually stand as one of the giants in modern American literature. He grew up in the Bronx and graduated from Kenyon College in 1952. He married, survived two years in the Army, tried script reading for Columbia Pictures and then went into publishing in Manhattan. He was editor of the New American Library and editor in chief of Dial Press in the late 1960s. Since then, Doctorow has been teacher, scholar or writer with Yale, Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, UC Irvine and New York University.

Since his first book, “Welcome to Hard Times,” was published 37 years ago, he has written a play, a book of essays and eight novels, including “The Book of Daniel” (1971), “Loon Lake” (1980), “World’s Fair” (1986), “Billy Bathgate” (1989) and, most recently, “The Waterworks” (1994).

In fact, the body of his work is so impressive that for his fans and his writing students, it often comes as a relief to learn that even the mighty Doctorow wrote one loser. It was his second book, called “Big as Life,” and it was the story of two naked figures loitering in the New York harbor.

“It was quite a bad book,” Doctorow says now, wincing as he is reminded about it. “It was the worst thing I have ever done. It had some good things in it, but I didn’t really make it work. It had--fortunately--a very small first printing. And I never let it get back in print.”

Mostly, however, Doctorow earns swooning praise from his reviewers and fans.

“Ragtime,” which has never been out of print and has been translated into more than 30 languages, has sold more than 4.5 million copies in English alone. When it first appeared in 1975, the Washington Post reviewer was so smitten that he apologized to readers about his effusiveness and said he had “ruthlessly pruned as many laudatory adjectives as possible” from the review.

Asked about how “Ragtime” seems to him 22 years after it was published, Doctorow sighs heavily. After all this time the book belongs to a new generation of students and critics, or as he puts it, with a teacher’s patience: “I’m not sure I’m the overriding authority on just what the book does and how it works now. Somebody who has read it and written about it more recently probably has a better grasp of it than I have.”

Nevertheless, he is willing to accommodate the question.

“I wrote that book as a kind of mock historical chronicle. It’s an impudent book,” he says. “It has things to say about the nature of history, and I think some truths about this country. And it keeps its distance from the characters; it makes no claims for them.

“The interesting thing that occurs, vis a vis the show, is that it’s not in the nature of musicals to keep their distance from the characters--where everyone sings how’I wrote [“Ragtime”] as a kind of mock historical chronicle. It’s an impudent book. It has things to say about the nature of history, and I think some truths about this country.’ they feel. They love or hate or they’re upset about something, and they’ll sing it.

“So, in effect, it’s an inversion of the entire technique of the book, but what’s interesting is that it comes out the same place that the book does. It registers very clearly the American allegory that’s implicit in the book, and I’m pleased about that.”

Although today’s readers, moviegoers and television viewers are more accustomed to a blending of fact and fiction, “Ragtime” startled many of its original consumers because some of the superstars of the era played roles alongside Doctorow’s own characters. This “mock history,” as he calls it, was a technique that irritated those who revered pure history.

Doctorow was also criticized by some historians for making up his versions of Houdini or Henry Ford, and even now the old spark reignites in Doctorow’s large, doleful eyes when he is asked whether something in the novel “really happened.” For example, there is a particularly powerful and bizarre encounter between financier J.P. Morgan and auto-magnate Henry Ford.

Did it happen? Did J.P. Morgan ever really meet Henry Ford?

“He has now,” Doctorow says with a smile.

Then, after harvesting the laugh from his listener, he explains about how he, as a novelist, looks at the differences between history and fiction.

“I think everything I’ve written about Morgan is absolutely true,” he says. “It’s true to the soul and spirit of the man, and I usually tell people that if they want to read fiction about Morgan then they ought to read his autobiography.

“History is always up for grabs, and not only by filmmakers and hack novelists but also by politicians and governments”

“As Orwell said in ‘1984,’ whoever controls the past controls the present, so obviously what you need is a multiplicity of witnesses.”

Doctorow pauses and takes a last sip of his coffee. “See, when history hardens and becomes official, it turns into myth,” he says. “I think what I proposed in this book was to play around with myth and explode it and try to turn it back into history.”

Such Doctorow aphorisms have been part of his writing classes for a dozen years. At New York University and Sarah Lawrence, he teaches select groups of graduate students about fine writing.

“I like to be around beginners,” he says. “It keeps you honest.”

In his classes, which he protects from outsiders--like reporters, or even friends--he talks about how hard it is to create a novel. Each time he writes, he must find the right “voice,” which is why each of his novels seems to be in a slightly different style. “The Book of Daniel,” a fictional version of the Rosenberg case, really began to work after Doctorow had thrown out 150 pages and wondered whether he should try another line of work.

“At that point, I stuck a piece of paper in the typewriter--we still had typewriters then--and I started to type something recklessly and irresponsibly almost in mockery of my own pretensions as a writer. It turned out to be the first page of ‘The Book of Daniel.’ ”

The birth of “Ragtime” was different. More embarrassing, as he puts it now:

“I had finished ‘The Book of Daniel’ and I was emotionally depleted and sat around for a year unable to write anything without realizing why--that I needed to recover. But the desperation got deeper and deeper, and as it happened I was sitting in my study on the third floor of our house in New Rochelle [N.Y.] and I was staring at the wall.

“So, I started to write about the wall,” he says with a smile, telling a favorite author’s story. “That’s the kind of day you have sometimes. The house had been built in 1906, and I thought about what things looked like around the house--and New Rochelle was very resolutely middle class and WASPish and people wore white in summer and Teddy Roosevelt was president, and one image led to another and I was off,” he says, now stopping for breath.

His next novel is at least a year away from bookstores, and he won’t talk about it, noting: “Any time you start talking about a book while you’re doing it, it’s a betrayal. When you talk about a book, you’re writing it, and then you’re sending it out to the air and it’s gone.”

What about another musical, maybe one based on his other novels?

“You know, before this, I never had much regard for musical theater,” he answers. “I’ve not really taken it seriously. Oh, I liked one or two, maybe, but I now think, after working with this one, that the possibilities of this form have hardly been scratched. It can be such a powerful thing, a musical. When you take the work of so many gifted people, as this show has, and you coordinate all of this talent. . . . “ He stops. “Well, it can just blow people away.”

*

* “Ragtime,” Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Opens June 15. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. $35-$75. Telecharge: (800) 447-7400.