That Killer Charm

The challenge of J.J. Hunsecker, says John Lithgow, who’s playing him in the new musical “Sweet Smell of Success,” “is getting the tone exactly right.” Arrogant, corrupt, megalomaniacal, the powerful newspaper gossip columnist “should be entertaining, but he’s a horrific character. Making him captivating and then heart-stopping is tricky business.”

For some time now, the tall and balding Lithgow, known professionally as exceedingly versatile and personally as genial and thoughtful, has been at work developing this duality.

Smiling, then scowling, back-patting, then stabbing, seducing, then cruelly scorning--the actor created Hunsecker’s character first in Chicago, where the musical premiered early this year, then in New York, where it’s in previews at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre and opening Thursday.

Winter visited Chicago more earnestly than it did New York this year, and on a snowy January morning there, Lithgow was sitting in his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel musing about the cynical character he’d chosen to tackle in his first starring vehicle (not counting the voice of Lord Farquaad in last year’s “Shrek”) since playing the daft Dick Solomon in the successful NBC sitcom “3rd Rock From the Sun” from 1996 to 2001.

“Sweet Smell” is the story of how the ruthless Hunsecker ruins the lives of three people: fawning publicist Sidney Falco; Hunsecker’s younger sister, of whom he’s overprotective; and the self-confident jazz musician she’s fallen in love with. It seemed an intriguing prospect. But in Chicago the musical received mixed reviews, a blow to its creators and producers in part because wildly inflated predictions had it a shoo-in for the Tony Award, this season’s “The Producers”--which was last year’s musical-based-on-a-movie, also set in New York and featuring two show-biz shysters, that also debuted in the Windy City.

The obvious difference is that “The Producers” is a comedy with a highly improbable plot and musical interludes already built in; “Sweet Smell of Success” is a dark, ugly, psychologically complex--and ultimately fascinating--story that has some basis in fact. Ernest Lehman, who wrote the 1950 novella on which the 1957 movie is based, had once worked for a movie publicist who supposedly inspired the character of the sleazy Sidney Falco, J.J.’s sycophantic item-supplier (played by Brian d’Arcy James).

Some people connected with the musical, including Lithgow, admit also being influenced by Neal Gabler’s biography of Walter Winchell, a once-ruthless, polemic columnist for the old New York Mirror who’d gotten his start in vaudeville.

“When I read the book,” says Nicholas Hytner, the show’s director, “I really started to see there could be music in this story. That wonderful, brutal, aggressive assault that Winchell launched on his readers ... has tremendous theatrical energy.”

“You see the engine that drives this character,” Lithgow says about the book. The vaudeville routine he does in “Don’t Look Now,” a number in Act 2, is not only derivative of Winchell’s life, but portrays his chameleon character: the jolly personality in the spotlight and the demanding, overbearing soul inside.

“When the villain is the star, you have to move carefully,” Lithgow continues, seemingly less concerned with the criticism in Chicago than some of his anxious associates. Burt Lancaster had played a brutal, chilling J.J. in the movie, a man seemingly without a nice bone in his body. In the musical, Lithgow can be a charmer--but one who turns on a dime.

“A demonic charmer,” as Hytner puts it, insisting that “it was never on our agenda to be faithful to the source. While all journalists know the movie,” he says of complaints that the show has strayed, “we’re playing to 95% houses that haven’t ever seen it.”

Lithgow says he’d been “captivated” by the project since first reading John Guare’s script, listening to a couple of the songs from the score by Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia, and “getting an idea how the music floats in and out of the story.” A workshop in July 2000, during a hiatus before the final season of “3rd Rock,” sealed the deal for him. (And for the producers, who agreed to postpone the show a year so that the actor could join the cast as the sinister Hunsecker.)

“This presented itself at just the right time,” Lithgow says of “Sweet Smell.” Not only was he new to musicals, the musical was new. He also looked forward to resuming the villain mantel after years of comedy. “It’s like crop rotation,” he says, deftly switching analogies, “like switching gears.”

Even before Lithgow, 56, was offered the part, he’d decided that the best way to come off a sitcom--which, with its live audience is, he says, much more akin to being in a play than a movie--would be to return to the theater. With a Tony for his Broadway debut (1973’s “The Changing Room”) and a resume that includes a decade in which he did a play a year, Lithgow hadn’t been on the New York stage since 1988, when he played the sexually hoodwinked French diplomat in “M. Butterfly” on Broadway.

Solomon, an alien-in-human-clothing in “3rd Rock’s” somewhat convoluted plot about a family from outer space that takes up residence in Ohio, was a broadly comedic figure. But Lithgow has had plenty of experience playing bad guys in films--as a cartoonish mad scientist (this time possessed by aliens) in 1984’s “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” Denzel Washington’s psychotic nemesis in 1991’s “Ricochet,” evil twin brothers in 1992’s “Raising Cain” and, notably, Sylvester Stallone’s menacing stalker in 1993’s “Cliffhanger.”

But for someone who thrives on mixing it up, Lithgow says he was beginning to tire of this diet, one of the reasons he was delighted in 1995 to sign on to “3rd Rock,” created with him in mind by Terry and Bonnie Turner, whom he’d met in the ‘80s when he had been host of “Saturday Night Live.” They wanted someone “who was a cross between Errol Flynn and Bugs Bunny,” he says, repeating the oft-quoted description. Of all the roles he’s played, Lithgow says, “this one was certainly closest to my id.”

“The movie jobs were becoming less and less interesting,” he says. “I’d become known as a penny-dreadful villain and, nothing wrong with that, but it was beginning to pile up. I thought I should do something completely different--I’d been ignoring what had been an ethic of mine: Don’t do anything that pigeonholes you.” Plus, as the father of two then-preteens (with his wife, Mary Yaeger, a UCLA history and economics professor), “I felt I should spend some time at home. Television is a wonderful job if you have a family.” (From his first marriage, Lithgow also has a son.)

What came out of “3rd Rock” for Lithgow, besides a lot of “delirious fun” and “the longest steady job I’ve ever had,” was a recognition that he says “made it possible for me to try other things because people would let me.”

Lying on the coffee table in front of him were galleys of “Micawber,” the actor’s third children’s book, which will be published in September. Starring an artistically precocious squirrel, “it’s a child’s guide to art and museum-going,” he says, proudly flipping through the pages of text illustrated by C.F. Payne.

He’s also recorded two CDs of songs--some original, some obscure Tin Pan Alley novelty tunes--and performed with symphony orchestras in concerts for children around the country, displaying a talent he’d first uncovered when, self-taught on the guitar, he began performing for his own children’s classes. “I’m living out my Danny Kaye fantasy,” he says happily. “Children are an incredible audience. It’s very difficult to keep their attention, but when you do, they’re extraordinarily grateful.”

His growing reputation with these concerts was, in fact, the reason why Hytner says there was no cause for concern that Lithgow had never before been in a musical. “He’s one of the great American stage actors,” the director says, “and it turns out he sings just fine.” (Hytner, a Brit, says he’d seen episodes of “3rd Rock” in England, although not the one in which Lithgow does a wild parody of Michael Flatley’s “Riverdance.”)

“Unwittingly, the concerts for children were great training for me. I’ve also taken some lessons, worked with people who know how to use the voice properly,” he reports in a recent conversation in New York, where the company has been working on “Sweet Smell” for weeks.

In 1952, the year when the musical is set, Lithgow was only 6, hardly cognizant of the politics and nightlife culture of an era in which innuendo, the weapon so deftly wielded by Hunsecker, gave power to sinister creatures.

Lithgow had, however, already made his stage debut. While hardly the usual story of a child actor--Lithgow went on to Harvard and studied on a Fulbright scholarship in England in 1967--he did grow up playing a variety of small roles in the Shakespearean festivals his father ran in the Northeast, including at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.

“Mine were mostly one-syllable roles,” the actor says of those days: “Nym, Poins, Pinch, Froth. Years later, I finally did a Laertes in a ‘Hamlet’ in the park [Central Park]. Now I’ve outgrown most of the roles, but I’d love sometime to do ‘King Lear’--yet another Lear,” he mocks the aging actor’s dream role.

But instead of positioning himself for the stage, Lithgow grew up intending to become an artist. From the inside, he says, theater life “looked scary and difficult--we lived in eight, 10 different places while I was growing up.”

“I’m a pretty talented painter--big oils, mostly figurative--but not a very good one,” he says. “I have a lot of facility, but I really stopped at age 19,” when he discovered in college theatrical productions “so much positive reinforcement and a community I loved. I like the reciprocity of the theater.”

Staying on in England after his Fulbright, he says “I was basically a barnacle on British theater,” among other adventures, coaching English actors, such as Peggy Ashcroft, in American dialect. In return, “I came home with a British accent,” quickly abandoned, he recalls, after “my sister refused to talk to me because I sounded so affected.”

“To do it well,” he returns to the subject of painting, “you have to do it.” Most brushwork that he’s accomplished in recent years has been on movie sets--a diversion from “the waiting around, the torpor” that he says makes “movies incredibly difficult for me.” His publisher has suggested that he illustrate his next book, “and I’m gearing up to that.”

When Lithgow arrived in New York in 1972, the year Winchell died, “I met a couple of the old-timers,” he says about the gossip columnists who were once a mainstay of the daily newspaper.

“Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson--they were in the last stages of their careers; there was something sort of spent, dead about them,” he continues. “I used that image for J.J. at the end.”

But he also feels he’s borrowed something of “the coldness of Burt’s performance” when Hunsecker is being his most ruthless. “I like being on a first-name basis with Burt,” he says, joking about “all the time we’ve been together.”

“This really isn’t like any other musical I can think of,” Lithgow says.

In its dark mood, “I used to compare it to ‘Cabaret,’ but that’s more about a global thing. This is the interaction of four people, one of whom is a killer.” But it also, he says, “captures the exuberance, the exhilaration of New York nightlife” at a time when columnists went on “nightly crawls.”

He has vicariously enjoyed discovering that time as well as whatever else has come with the show. “I see myself as a tool for the writers, but I’m also a very vocal, activist actor,” Lithgow says. “I came up with a few bright ideas, although I won’t tell you which ones. And a lot that were ignored.” He quotes what he says has become the cast’s “slogan,” attributed to his co-star James: “‘Revivals are for cowards.’”

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“Sweet Smell of Success” at the Martin Beck Theatre, 240 W. 44th St., New York, opens Thursday. For tickets and performance times, call (212) 239-6200.

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Blake Green is a staff writer for Newsday, a Tribune company.