The Way He Was--and Is

In the early ‘70s, writer Arthur Laurents was on his way to Barbra Streisand’s New York apartment to pitch the star on a idea for a film.

In the script he’d write for her, she would be teaching disabled children to sing in Brooklyn Heights: “The Sound of Music” meets “The Miracle Worker.” But while talking to Streisand, whom he had directed in the 1963 Broadway musical “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” Laurents came up with a different idea. As Streisand gabbed on, he was suddenly reminded of a young woman he knew from his days as an undergraduate at Cornell University.

“Frizzy hair and sensible shoes, a brown skirt and blouse, a red scarf, handing out leaflets in 1937 on the Arts campus. ‘Stop Franco!’ ‘Stop the war in Spain!’ ” writes Laurents in his “Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood,” which will hit stores March 28. “Her name--the coincidence was surely an omen--was Fanny Price.”

Fanny Brice, of course, was the character Streisand played in “Funny Girl.” Fanny Price would be the inspiration for Laurents’ brassy heroine in the 1973 film “The Way We Were.” And the evolution of this original story--from scenes scratched out on yellow legal pads to a glossy Hollywood film starring Streisand and Robert Redford--is just one of the creative journeys traced in the book by Laurents, best known for his books for the classic musicals “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” and his screenplay of the 1977 film “The Turning Point.”

Those journeys often left Laurents enraged and frustrated. No more so than during “The Way We Were,” when the usual indignities suffered by writers in Hollywood were compounded by the fact that the movie was his most autobiographical work.

Hubbell Gardner, the tormented WASP, is a composite drawn from friends, including some of Laurents’ male lovers. The Jewish firebrand, Katie Morosky, stems as much from the writer as from Fanny Price. Her clarifying rage at injustice and hypocrisy, which galvanizes the film, runs like a rich lode throughout Laurents’ caustic and gossipy book as it ricochets from his early years as a screenwriter in Hollywood (“Snakepit,” “Rope,” “Anastasia”) to his blacklisting in the ‘50s, to his heady, if turbulent, forays in theater (“The Time of the Cuckoo,” “La Cage aux Folles”).

“My father was a humanitarian, a great man; the anger I got from my mother,” says Laurents. “She was a socialist atheist until she met my father, then she became a Jew with a vengeance.”

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Sitting in the placid surroundings of his posh art-crammed townhouse in Greenwich Village, the laughter and cries of children at play seeping in from the schoolyard across the street, Laurents shows no sign that the passion that infused much of his writing has diffused. At 82, this literary lion in winter may have mellowed, but he’s hardly toothless. “I hope not,” he says, settling his lithe frame, toned from skiing and regular exercise, into a chair. “If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.”

Indeed, Laurents has bounced back with remarkable productivity from the bruising debacle of the 1991 Broadway musical flop “Nick and Nora,” which he wrote and directed and which closed soon after opening to negative reviews. He has since written four new plays, one of which, “Al Jolson Sings Again” about the Hollywood Communist witch hunt, will be done this fall, possibly starring Patti LuPone. His 1952 drama “The Time of the Cuckoo,” later made into a film starring Katharine Hepburn and released as “Summertime,” has been revived with Debra Monk at Lincoln Center Theater and plays through May 7.

Earlier this year, two more Laurents works were presented: “Home of the Brave,” his first Broadway play in 1945 about anti-Semitism, was revived at the Jewish Repertory Theatre in Manhattan; and “Do I Hear a Waltz?,” a musical based on “Cuckoo” on which he collaborated with Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers, was revived at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J., the same theater where “Jolson” premiered.

In his chapters on his theatrical adventures, Laurents aims barbs at Rodgers and others (the composer of such endearing classics as “The Sound of Music” and “The King and I” comes off as a mean-spirited egomaniac and boozer with an eye for the ladies). But Laurents reserves most of his venom for Hollywood.

While he doesn’t exactly spare himself for his misjudgments, hotheadedness and sexual promiscuity, Laurents is wickedly frank in exposing the foibles and pretensions of the legends he either worked for or partied with, including Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock (who cut Laurents adrift when he chose not to write one of the master’s pictures).

Telling the truth led all too frequently to ruptures and accusations of betrayal, according to the writer, who harshly details his unhappy experiences working on “The Way We Were” and “The Turning Point.” He viewed both films as a caldron of backstabbing. On the former, Laurents was fired at one point. After 11 other screenwriters tried their hands to placate the mercurial stars and director, producer Ray Stark called to rehire Laurents, who got even by holding them hostage to a huge fee.

Looking at the film today, Laurents says that it displays some fine chemistry between Streisand and Redford. But he also thinks the original story was seriously damaged by superstar personas and Hollywood hokum.

“Anyone who becomes a movie star must be superhuman to remain human. Superhuman, Barbra was not,” he writes, nor for that matter was Redford. Too often, according to Laurents, the movie became, in Redford’s case, about hair and teeth and white turtleneck sweaters to set off baby blues. For Streisand, he says, it was about grand accents and fingernails, and for director Sydney Pollack, outdoor cafes in a college town that would never have had one.

The writer says he tried to infuse reality in “The Turning Point,” a movie he wrote for Nora Kaye, a former ballerina who married Herbert Ross, the movie’s director. Kaye had an affair with Laurents when both were young and struggling. Laurents says his efforts to include a gay subplot were sabotaged by Ross, whom he’d known well for more than 25 years by that time.

In the memoirs, Laurents writes of confronting the director in his Beverly Hill manse (“the bamboo-and-chintz lanai”). “Herb took a drag on the cigarette in his holder and held that hand out toward me, palm up, fingers curled,” he writes. “Nobody in the ballet is gay anymore.”

Ross, who has read the book, responded: “I can’t honestly remember saying that. There was certainly no attempt on my part or Nora’s to disguise the fact that there are a lot of gay men in ballet, as there are straight men. But, though we had a lot of discussion of how to deal with homosexuality in the film, the movie was not concerned with that, but with the narrative between these two women.”

Ross adds that collaborating with Laurents--including as choreographer of the Broadway musicals “Wholesale,” “Anyone Can Whistle” and “Do I Hear a Waltz?”--could be a challenging. “He’s hot-tempered, but I always found that an endearing quality,” Ross says. “He’s a very passionate man, and that was just an expression of how much he cared about the work.”

Though Laurents thought that his billing on “Point” as co-producer would protect his vision, he was mistaken.

“Everybody wants control out there and I guess people in theater do as well, but you can’t control everything,” he says, espousing what he learned from the 12-step program he entered to quit smoking. “You can’t control very much actually. You have to accept your responsibility to try to do certain things. But in the end, a lot of things are out of your hands. As soon as you accept that, the better off you are.”

Burned by the “Turning Point” experience, Laurents stopped working in movies for good, despite the wild success of both films. Asked if the fat checks didn’t mitigate his resentment, he says, “No. It never has for me. It helps, but it’s the quality of the experience. I never liked working in Hollywood. They kiss your ass until you get there, and then they get the script and they throw you out on your ass.”

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The antidote for Laurents was to return to his first love: theater. His latest play, “Jolson Sings Again, deals with the crisis that arose in the early ‘50s when the House Committee on Un-American Activities turned up the heat on Hollywood. Laurents was blacklisted while some of his former collaborators, such as director director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, chose to name names. That would make working with Robbins afterward rather tense--not that there wasn’t tension from the beginning.

After all, Laurents collaborated--and battled--with some of the brightest and most neurotic talents pushing theatrical forms to new heights: in addition to Robbins, composers Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein, producer David Merrick and stars Ethel Merman and Shirley Booth, to name just a few.

The prickly Laurents had a cigar box on his desk into which he would discard the photos of friends who had offended him. Robbins, the genius behind “West Side Story,” “Gypsy” and countless other musicals and ballets, was often there.

“Lenny’s insanity was attractive, endearing and funny,” says Laurents. “But Jerry, forget it! Not a prayer. The real test comes when you achieve something and what do you think of yourself then? If you believe it, that you’re the greatest thing to come down the pike, you’re dead.”

In the book, there is a weirdly touching deathbed scene between Bernstein and Laurents in which they recount their former triumphs and follies. Then the maestro abruptly asks his old friend to tell him the exact details of his sex life. Laurents refuses Bernstein’s dying request. “That’s just a line I won’t cross,” he says. “I have no interest in the details of people’s sex lives, and I’m not about to reveal mine.”

Laurents has no hesitation in spicing up the memoir with his many sexual conquests, making himself out to be some sort of a bookish stud muffin. He now describes as “adolescent and compulsive” his behavior in the testosterone-soaked atmospheres of first his military period during World War II and then in Hollywood (bookending the period he settled down with actor Farley Granger). But he adds that when he embarked on telling his life story, Tom Hatcher, a landscape artist and his longtime partner, warned him that if he was going to discuss his sex life, then he shouldn’t hold anything back.

“I was a little queasy about it at first, but sex is primal and a big motivating factor,” says Laurents, who also details his many years in psychoanalysis.

Though he doesn’t consider himself to be a pioneer in gay liberation, some might consider brave his defiant attitude to living openly with a lover in the ‘40s and ‘50s, a time when it was not only socially unacceptable but also possibly criminal. He makes a point of noting those Hollywood lions, like director Anatole Litvak with whom he worked on “Anastasia,” who socially embraced his male partners as they would the wives or husbands of other colleagues.

“It’s hard to believe that as commendable in these days,” he says. “But then it was quite a statement. You still have to wonder what people say when you leave a room.”

Laurents has little sympathy for those gays who marry without divulging their sexual preference to their partner, something he says is rather common in Hollywood. “It’s cruel and hurtful and terribly selfish,” he says. “Besides, I don’t think anybody is really fooling anybody. Hollywood’s really absurd that way.”

Peering through the looking glass of his life and career has been fun, says Laurents, particularly at this point. He has never been happier or more fulfilled, and he credits much of that to Hatcher, who after the debacle of “Nick and Nora,” suggested to him that the flop might have been for the best. At another time, says Laurents, he might have responded with a barnyard epithet. But largely through the 12-step program to which he was introduced by Hatcher, the writer has come to believe in a higher power, after many years as a confirmed atheist.

“People who know me are surprised,” he says, “but it has changed my life. I believe that everything that happens, happens for a reason and I choose to think it’s a good reason.”

At the very least, it has given him what he thinks is a good ending to his memoirs. “And as Rose says in ‘Gypsy,’ ‘If you have a good, strong finish, they’ll forgive anything.’ ”