{"id":63074,"date":"2013-11-29T13:11:55","date_gmt":"2013-11-29T18:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=63074"},"modified":"2013-12-06T13:05:04","modified_gmt":"2013-12-06T18:05:04","slug":"loveland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/29\/loveland\/","title":{"rendered":"Loveland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FolliesTheaterPosterlarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had any visual talent, I would have loved to be a filmmaker,\u201d Stephen Sondheim told me in a recent phone interview. \u201cBut I didn\u2019t. So this is what I became.\u201d It\u2019s jarring to think that the legendary composer-lyricist of Sweeney Todd<\/i> and Into the Woods<\/i> only resorted to musical theater out of an inability to compose a wide shot. In the 1950s Sondheim directed amateur horror movies (\u201cThe photography is like a five-year-old\u2019s\u201d) and he later co-wrote the enjoyably chilly mystery film The Last of Sheila<\/i>, but he has made a relatively piddling contribution to the art form that is deepest in his bones. As he told Frank Rich in 2000, \u201cMovies were, and still are, my basic language.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the language he used to write Follies<\/i>, the sumptuous 1971 Broadway musical about middle-aged showgirls gathering for a boozy, confrontational reunion on the eve of their old theater\u2019s destruction. While critics have treated the show as an elegy to the theater, Hollywood seems to have been the headiest influence on Follies<\/i>\u2019 creative team. Sondheim has said that during the writing process, he \u201ccould only imagine the spectacle of a Ziegfeldian \u2018Loveland\u2019 in terms of movie musicals,\u201d and co-director Harold Prince\u2019s concept for Follies<\/i> as a story about \u201crubble in the daylight\u201d grew out of a\u00a0 Life<\/i> magazine photo<\/a> of Gloria Swanson standing in the ruins of the Roxy movie palace. Prince insisted that the libretto be rewritten to include cinematic techniques like dissolves, close-ups, and black-and-white flashbacks, and the orchestrations were deliberately rigged with MGM-isms (like the thrilling piano-to-orchestra swell midway through \u201cBeautiful Girls\u201d). Even the casting of old vaudevillians in many of the roles was inspired by Billy Wilder\u2019s casting of silent movie actors in Sunset Boulevard<\/i>. \u201cWe just kept hoovering up people who were close to the story,\u201d Prince explained to me in a phone call. \u201cThat\u2019s what Billy Wilder did: he put Swanson in the part so you thought, \u2018Hey, she\u2019s playing herself.\u2019 She wasn\u2019t, of course, but you made that connection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was the fabled original production of Follies<\/i> always pining away to be a movie? I called Sondheim and Prince after learning that they actually had<\/i> cooked up a scheme to make a film version in the early 1970s, featuring dozens of faded stars from Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age congregating on a studio backlot about to be torn down. It is intoxicating to imagine such a film, with archival footage of the stars sewn into the plot, and each cut functioning like an electric restoration of youth.<\/p>\n

In 1972, Prince proposed the idea to MGM production chief Daniel Melnick, suggesting that they throw a huge party on the MGM lot\u2014\u201cmaybe over one night, maybe two nights\u201d\u2014and invite every star who\u2019d ever been under contract, from June Allyson to Lana Turner. \u201cWe\u2019d have all these movie stars wandering around at this party,\u201d said Prince, \u201ctalking about movies and talking to each other and partying in front of a documentary camera.\u201d Prince spoke to cinema v\u00e9rit\u00e9 pioneer D.\u2009A. Pennebaker about filming the evening, and planned to lure recalcitrant stars by selling the party \u201cas a charitable thing,\u201d with $10,000 appearance fees that would be donated to the Motion Picture Home (a now-shuttered retirement community for actors, directors, and others in the industry). \u201cThen they\u2019ll fight<\/i> to get in the movie,\u201d Prince reasoned.<\/p>\n

The musical numbers, and scenes of marital squabbling between Follies<\/i>\u2019 main characters, Ben, Buddy, Phyllis, and Sally, were to be shot separately and spliced in later. When I asked Prince which movie stars he\u2019d wanted to play the leads, he immediately said, \u201cWe had no such intention. I would have been perfectly happy to have [original Broadway cast member] Gene Nelson play Buddy. And nobody was ever better than Dorothy Collins [as Sally]. Ever<\/i>.\u201d He envisioned a perverse sort of MGM Rosencrantz and Guildenstern<\/i>, with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly reduced to walk-ons and relative pee-wees like Collins and Nelson promoted to the leads. (Collins had never even been<\/i> in a film.)<\/p>\n

Prince\u2019s press agent John Springer was more hucksterish about casting. In a number of letters (one<\/a> to Liz Smith, another<\/a> to The New York Times<\/i>), Springer recalled doling out Follies<\/i> songs to Old Hollywood icons with a sort of Easter Bunny benevolence. He played \u201cI\u2019m Still Here\u201d for his client Bette Davis, who went nuts for it (\u201cIt could have been written for me!\u201d) and asked to sing it in the movie. \u201cAll through a trip I made with Bette to Australia and New Zealand,\u201d Springer wrote, \u201cshe was playing the 1971 Follies cast album and learning the song, and you haven\u2019t heard anything until you\u2019ve heard Bette Davis sing \u2018I\u2019m Still Here.\u2019\u201d After briefly considering Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine to play the miserably married Buddy and Sally, Springer approached Singin\u2019 in the Rain<\/i> costars Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, both of whom were \u201centhusiastic\u201d about reteaming. He offered the roles of the bickering upper-crust couple Ben and Phyllis to Henry Fonda and Elizabeth Taylor, but then \u201cRichard Burton insisted he play opposite her. Henry Fonda laughed and said, \u2018Let him play it!\u2019\u201d Springer further claimed that he\u2019d committed Gloria Swanson to sing the ghoulish aria \u201cOne More Kiss,\u201d Leslie Caron to do \u201cAh, Paris!\u201d, and Joan Crawford for the Depression era hard-luck song, \u201cBroadway Baby.\u201d Prince remembered getting a letter from Crawford \u201csaying how much she\u2019d like to do it,\u201d and her Baby Jane<\/i> nemesis Davis begrudgingly made peace with the matter of their co-starring. \u201cI won’t work with that bitch again,\u201d she told Springer, \u201cbut we wouldn’t be in the same scenes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s hilarious,\u201d Sondheim said when I repeated Davis\u2019s quip. \u201cJohn Springer made up things. I would say that\u2019s apocryphal.\u201d Best known for his militant discretion (even with long-dead clients like Marilyn Monroe), Springer spent his spare time collecting thousands of old production stills and writing gushy, insubstantial books of film history. \u201cHe was in love with movies, in love with movie stars, and I wouldn\u2019t believe one<\/i> word he said,\u201d said Sondheim. Still, Springer\u2019s Fantasy Football Follies<\/i> sounds pretty sublime\u2014with the exception of Taylor and Burton, two non-singers who probably seem so inappropriate for Ben and Phyllis because the mythologically correct casting is obvious: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Sondheim wrote Ben\u2019s top-hat number \u201cLive, Laugh, Love\u201d as an homage to Astaire\u2019s clipped, aloof performing style (\u201cAstaire\u2019s persona is the way Ben sees himself,\u201d he explained), and when asked in 2009 what performer of the past he wished had sung his music, Sondheim replied, \u201cNobody really. Well, actually, Fred Astaire.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Sondheim didn\u2019t have them in mind, the biographies of Ginger Rogers, Debbie Reynolds, and Gene Kelly seem imbedded in the other three Follies<\/i> leads. Phyllis\u2019 strenuous efforts to transform herself into something more than a gum-chewing showgirl are mirrored in Rogers\u2019 ambition to shed movie musicals<\/a> for the self-important forties weepies in which she was eventually entombed. Even her characters were always struggling for respectability\u2014in immortal Gershwin lyrics<\/a> that were written for her, Rogers pledged to \u201ctake oysters and give up ersters\u201d for Astaire. Near the end of Follies<\/i>, Phyllis sings of her bifurcated self:<\/p>\n

\n

Jessie is racy,
but hard as a rock.
Lucy is lacy,
but dull as a smock.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The lyrics read like a mocking capsule of Rogers\u2019 career arc.<\/p>\n

Sally is the most dementedly nostalgic of the Follies<\/i> girls, just as Debbie Reynolds was (according to journalist Aljean Harmetz) \u201cthe only movie star who seemed to feel any deep pain\u201d when a cash-strapped MGM auctioned off its props and costumes in 1970. Reynolds is Sally: she only watches old movies, hoarded memorabilia to the point of bankruptcy, and may even have dealt with mental illness. (Her daughter Carrie Fisher explained, \u201cWe never called it a nervous breakdown. It was a nervous break through<\/i>. She just kept going.\u201d) Judy Garland had died in 1969, and one might wish that she\u2019d toughed it out a few more years and brought her yearning, drug-ravaged vibrato to \u201cLosing My Mind,\u201d Sally\u2019s debilitating torch song. But Debbie Reynolds\u2019s lunchbox wholesomeness is more appropriate for Sally, the sweet, suicidal homemaker. She would have represented chipper Americana gone mad.<\/p>\n

The original Buddy, Gene Nelson, admitted that strangers constantly mistook him for Gene Kelly (Nelson thought \u201cit could have been wishful thinking on their part\u201d), and the character\u2019s dance routines seem designed to exploit Kelly\u2019s athleticism and manic exuberance. Buddy is a traveling salesman (as Kelly\u2019s father had been), and his reference to being \u201cgood at selling\u201d perfectly sums up Gene Kelly\u2019s gift for simulating joy onscreen even when he was privately miserable. \u201cThat\u2019s what I get paid for doing,\u201d he once said. \u201cFor smiling at four o\u2019clock when I\u2019d rather go home.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mythic presence of these four stars would have papered over all of Follies<\/i>\u2019 dramaturgical cracks. It would not have mattered that, in James Goldman\u2019s wooden-boy libretto, the only moment where humans seem to be speaking is when Ben reminds Sally that she used to \u201ceat Baby Ruths for breakfast.\u201d Persistent criticism of the stage Follies<\/i> has centered on the petty, self-involved marital issues of the leads, but what seemed petty when John McMartin and Alexis Smith went through it would have become monumental when enacted by movie gods. Astaire and Rogers mulling divorce would be like watching Rushmore crumble. And Springer\u2019s casting would only have intensified the wallop of Sally choosing Fred Astaire over Gene Kelly: it is the ultimate choice of fantasy over flesh.<\/p>\n

If Prince had consented to cast Follies<\/i> this way, he would have been asking these stars to take sledgehammers to themselves\u2014and it\u2019s unclear whether they could have been persuaded to appear in a movie about their own deterioration. \u201cGene I knew very well,\u201d said Prince, \u201cand he actually could have played that part. Whether he would<\/i> have or not is another question. Because he wore a hairpiece. I don\u2019t know that he would\u2019ve.\u201d The uber-Christian Ginger Rogers probably wouldn\u2019t have played the profane, cuckolding Phyllis. \u201cI got a movie offer recently,\u201d she told People<\/i> in 1980, \u201cBut am I going to ruin my image by passing dope on the screen?\u201d In a recent interview, Debbie Reynolds said, \u201cI don\u2019t accept any parts that are devastating because I don\u2019t want to be unhappy in my life.\u201d As for Astaire\u2014whose Follies<\/i> character sweats, swears, and muffs lyrics\u2014choreographer Hermes Pan noted, \u201cAstaire would never say anything or use any language that he didn\u2019t feel was gentlemanly. I remember once there was a line that read, \u2018my feet hurt.\u2019 That\u2019s it, just \u2018my feet hurt.\u2019 Astaire looked at that script and said, \u2018I won\u2019t say it! I would never say it!\u2019 He was so upset, he even hit the script, \u2018My feel hurt? Never!\u2019 And he never did say it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So much about MGM has never been said. It\u2019s been difficult for film historians to get stars to talk honestly about their experiences, to scrape off the crowd-pleasing shellac. \u201cAll my life I\u2019ve tried to be an eight-by-ten glossy,\u201d said Ann Miller, who always maintained that working at MGM \u201cwas like going to a party every day.\u201d However, several behind-the-scenes stories have a Brothers Grimm gruesomeness to them. Astaire had to shoot his knees full of painkillers to get through the \u201cTriplets\u201d<\/a> number in The Band Wagon<\/i>, Miller\u2019s false nose sometimes flew off during her dance turns, and Rogers removed her shoes after forty-eight takes of the \u201cNever Gonna Dance\u201d<\/a> routine only to find that \u201cthey were filled with blood.\u201d MGM writers in the early 1930s spent their lunches at an opium den on the lot, and the \u201cloud and raucous\u201d musicians and artists in the prestigious Arthur Freed Unit were ostracized by the rest of MGM, possibly due to their unabashed homosexuality. (One screenwriter referred to the Freed unit as \u201cthe gay community there. Freed wasn\u2019t gay but the rest of them were.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Dirt of this caliber probably wouldn\u2019t have been shared by movie stars on camera\u2014even to D.\u2009A. Pennebaker, who\u2019d developed the first handheld sound-synch cameras in the 1960s in order to shoot his subjects unobtrusively, and who sometimes hid his camera on the floor or in his lap. \u201cYou know, I\u2019ve filmed actors,\u201d Pennebaker told me, \u201cand they don\u2019t have much to talk about<\/i>. Their business is not being particularly intellectual; they\u2019re just waiting for another job. Or maybe another wife.\u201d He laughed. \u201cWho knows what drives them? I did [a 1962 documentary] with Jane Fonda, whom I did<\/i> like, because she was so determined to tip the apple cart, and didn\u2019t give a shit about what people said. But very few movie stars would have breached [their personas], their bits of business. That\u2019s what their lives depended on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prince argued, \u201cEven if they were not<\/i> honest: if they were hysterical, or dishonest, it would have been interesting. I mean, the idea was not necessarily to bring down an audience. It was to show movie stars at a party.\u201d The last time so many stars had mingled on film was at MGM\u2019s twenty-fifth anniversary luncheon in 1949; there is remarkable footage<\/a> of the event in which Lena Horne can be seen glumly chewing stuffed squash as Katharine Hepburn ignores her in the next seat. The lyricist-screenwriter Adolph Green recalled a dessert of ice cream molded in the shape of MGM lions, as well as \u201can air of impending disaster. We sat through the long speeches, looking at all those lions melting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Green was referring to the incipient end of the studio system (due to a 1948 Supreme Court antitrust ruling that banned studios from owning their own movie theaters), as well as the death of the movie musical\u2014an art form that Sondheim has never been fond of. \u201cThere are no great movie musicals,\u201d he told me. \u201cSingin\u2019 in the Rain<\/i> is the one that comes closest. Movies are by their very nature reportorial, so as soon as people start to sing, it\u2019s hilarious. Whereas in the theater, the audience signs a fantasy contract when they enter, saying that they will believe<\/i> in people facing front and singing.\u201d This is an old saw of Sondheim\u2019s that has never made any sense to me (he himself loves film noir, which is hardly reportorial), but it\u2019s true that at MGM\u2019s preening height, the American audience had a \u201cfantasy contract\u201d with movie musicals, one that had expired by 1972. Harold Prince\u2019s movie of Follies<\/i> might have been a devastating examination of how that contract was broken\u2014a two-hour close-up of the melting lion.<\/p>\n

Pauline Kael once said, \u201cI have learned when talking with movie directors never to ask what happened to the project they were just about to start the last time I spoke with them. In one form or another, everyone connected with movies seems to spend most of his life and almost all of his energy on projects that are never realized.\u201d Harold Prince\u2019s movie musical of Follies<\/i> was one such project, though the reasons why are gnarled and contradictory. The director\u2019s papers at the New York Public Library contain only two yellowed, typewritten scraps related to the project. The first describes a sequence \u201cIn which Mickey Rooney (today) wanders drunkenly into the Judge Hardy house area of the lot and carries on a conversation with [archival footage of] Lewis Stone.\u201d The second scrap relates the film\u2019s ending: the posing of an MGM group portrait (\u201cwhile many are smiling, some are distorted or nervous or apprehensive or embarrassed or grim\u201d) that is intercut with shots of \u201chands busily jamming sticks of dynamite into the Hardy house and other recognizable locations. As we settle on the close-up of Alexis [Smith], we hear in the distance a voice cajoling everyone to smile, which she does, as a flashbulb goes off. Simultaneously with the flashbulb is the explosion. It\u2019s Hiroshima again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was the project sunk by the tedious, deep-dish tone suggested by that Hiroshima line? John Springer claimed that Prince \u201chad a furious quarrel with someone at MGM and withdrew the project,\u201d and it\u2019s plausible that the director might have felt manipulated by the studio, just as he\u2019d felt in 1967 while preparing a movie of She Loves Me<\/i>. (When producers pushed him to make the film in Culver City under Gene Kelly\u2019s tutelage, he snappishly wrote back, \u201cWith all respect for the MGM musical of the forties, I think there\u2019s room for improvement today. I cannot honestly accept the posture of a neophyte in the experienced world of MGM production.\u201d)<\/p>\n

However, Prince simply remembers the MGM Follies<\/i> dying off due to apathy. \u201cI\u2019m sorry that Danny [Melnick] didn\u2019t realize what a good idea it was,\u201d he said. \u201cThe problem was that everybody thought it was kind of a downer,\u201d said Pennebaker. Undeterred, Prince hired transgressive Off-Broadway playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie to write a screenplay. \u201cHal and I flew out to Hollywood,\u201d said van Itallie, \u201cand we went from movie studio to movie studio. At that point the studios were scaling down and selling off their back lots, and Hal was trying to decide which one he wanted to blow up. I enjoyed the glamour of it, but I don\u2019t think I did a great job on the screenplay. I felt trapped by the sentimentality of the characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

In April 1973 The New York Times<\/i> reported that the film was in development at 20th Century Fox; by November van Itallie had been replaced by Hugh Wheeler, who was fresh off a Tony win for his A Little Night Music<\/i> libretto. According to Prince\u2019s producing partner John P. Flaxman, the Wheeler screenplay \u201cwas loaded with potential. I still feel that to this day. But 20th had another musical in development at the same time, and it came down to which one they felt like doing. Unfortunately for us, they picked the other one\u201d\u2014which turned out to be Peter Bogdanovich\u2019s critically reviled<\/a> At Long Last Love<\/i>. \u201cThat<\/i> happened because I stuck pins in a doll every night before I went to bed,\u201d Flaxman said drily.<\/p>\n

Prince may have felt the yen for a voodoo doll of his own when That\u2019s Entertainment<\/i> came out in 1974. Executive-produced by Daniel Melnick, the film was an MGM musical omnibus in which old numbers were intercut with newly-shot clips of faded stars roaming the studio lot. \u201cI know that Hal was always bitter, because he felt that Melnick stole our idea and just did it in a different way,\u201d said Flaxman. Today, Prince is demurer on the issue. \u201cI always wondered whether it had had any influence,\u201d he explained. \u201cBut I never knew, and I wouldn\u2019t accuse anybody of that. Maybe there were documents way back when contemplating That\u2019s Entertainment<\/i>.\u201d Still, the film\u2019s one moment of poetry seems lifted directly from Prince\u2019s brain. A scene from The Band Wagon<\/i> of Fred Astaire striding past a gleaming silver train and singing \u201cBy Myself\u201d is followed by an identical trucking shot of a doddering Astaire, walking through the rusty, tattered train station set and humming a melancholy reprise. Melnick\u2019s movie even nicked a line Prince had used to describe Follies<\/i> to the press: \u201cIt is saying: this is the last you\u2019ll ever see of anything like that.\u201d Reading off a TelePrompter in That\u2019s Entertainment<\/i>\u2019s opening segment, Frank Sinatra intones, \u201cYou\u2019ll never see the likes of this again.\u201d<\/p>\n

In its review, The New York Times<\/i> raved, \u201cThis isn\u2019t nostalgia, it\u2019s history\u201d\u2014but That\u2019s Entertainment<\/i> has no real documentary value; the introductory segments are marvels of charitable soft-focus. Reflecting on the breathtakingly tacky \u201cHoe Down\u201d number from Babes on Broadway<\/i>, Mickey Rooney chuckles, \u201cWhere we got all that energy I\u2019ll never know,\u201d having apparently forgotten that he and Garland were regularly prescribed amphetamines by MGM\u2019s physician. Prince\u2019s movie of Follies<\/i> would have been an opportunity to expose the fluttering cellophane dishonesty of these musicals, in which, Sondheim explained, \u201cIt was joke-song-dance, joke-song-dance. Yes, there was a plot\u2014so-and-so\u2019s sister was being passed off as a cadet\u2014but you weren\u2019t emotionally involved.\u201d That\u2019s Entertainment<\/i> simply carbonated that formula (to song-dance-song-dance) and advocated a retreat to Old Hollywood delusions. \u201cBoy, do we need it now,\u201d read the ad campaign<\/a>, in an attempt to ride the country\u2019s Vietnam-induced nostalgia craze.<\/p>\n

The gambit worked, and what was essentially a cheap clip show (MGM paid each star $150 for their introductory segments) grossed over fifty million dollars, spawned two sequels, and reignited the dinner-theater careers of scores of dusty B-listers (like Van Johnson and Carleton Carpenter) who were featured in it. The MGM backlot was bulldozed<\/a> right after the shooting of That\u2019s Entertainment<\/i> and sold to real-estate developers, and the film\u2019s premiere even prompted the sort of star-laden party Prince had envisioned for Follies<\/i>: at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on May 17, 1974, Johnny Weissmuller did the Tarzan yell, Howard Keel sang, and Astaire and Rogers briefly fox-trotted. Photographers arranged an MGM group portrait<\/a> that included June Allyson, Cyd Charisse, Jimmy Durante, Ava Gardner, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, Shirley MacLaine, Donna Reed, Debbie Reynolds, Alexis Smith, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lassie. George Hamilton interviewed the stars, offering idiotic gung-ho encouragement to Weissmuller (who had broken his hip) and Kelly (who felt himself too old \u201cto do any serious dancing\u201d). \u201cI hope that hip heals and we\u2019ll see you swing from another tree pretty soon,\u201d Hamilton said to the sixty-nine-year-old Weissmuller, who morosely replied, \u201cI\u2019ll be all right.\u201d The public\u2019s refusal to accept the aging of its stars irritated Astaire. \u201cI don\u2019t know why people think you can keep on dancing,\u201d he told People<\/i> in 1976. \u201cIt\u2019s hard labor. A ballplayer is old at thirty-five. You can\u2019t go on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Movie stars must<\/i> go on: it is, as Orson Welles observed, the plight of \u201ceverybody who lives longer than they should.\u201d Welles was like most stars in that he did what he\u2019d be remembered for at twenty-five and then seemed to spend his next forty years on earth dawdling. \u201cI\u2019m Still Here\u201d (which Sondheim intended as \u201ca loose biography of Joan Crawford\u201d) is an anthem delivered from the depths of that dawdling period:<\/p>\n

\n

First you\u2019re another
Sloe-eyed vamp,
Then someone\u2019s mother,
Then you\u2019re camp.
Then you career
From career to career.
I\u2019m almost through my memoirs,
And I\u2019m here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Two years before he died, Orson Welles was still careering, and agonizing over the failure of his 1973 film F for Fake<\/i>. \u201cIt just broke my heart that it never caught on,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause that would have solved my old age. I could have made an essay movie\u2014two of \u2018em a year, you see?\u201d The Follies<\/i> movie could have similarly solved the old age of its stars: made them relevant, given them one dissonant, modern swan song. Instead, they were relegated to touring productions, talk shows, and commercials. June Allyson hawked adult diapers<\/a> and Ann Miller tap-danced on giant soup cans<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nine MGM women did convene for a \u201cBeautiful Girls\u201d-style reunion sequence<\/a> at the 1986 Oscars, and a few others (Marge Champion, Betty Garrett, Dolores Gray) even clawed their way into Follies<\/i> revivals. Ann Miller sang \u201cI\u2019m Still Here\u201d in the 1998 Paper Mill production, and the way the orchestra abruptly cuts out after her \u201cLord knows, at least I\u2019ve been there<\/i>\u201d is ludicrously touching. I may have been the most rinky-dink of MGM stars<\/i>, Miller seems to be conceding, but I was there<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Her performance<\/a> offers the only visceral hint of what a Follies<\/i> movie might have been. But\u2014nonexistent as they are\u2014every number is so vivid to me. In the words of Buddy, \u201cI see it all. It\u2019s like a movie in my head that plays and plays.\u201d A disenchanted, half-drunk Frank Sinatra could have sung \u201cBeautiful Girls\u201d and then ditched the party. Kelly, Reynolds, and Donald O\u2019Connor could have donned their old slickers for the novelty throwaway \u201cRain on the Roof,\u201d and Lena Horne, whose one-song cameos had often been cut in the South and who\u2019d felt \u201cscrewed\u201d by MGM, might have refashioned the mirror number \u201cWho\u2019s That Woman?\u201d into a seething condemnation of her deracinated 1940s persona<\/a>. (\u201cI\u2019ve been through so many changes and projected so many images,\u201d Horne admitted in 1981, \u201cthat sometimes I look in the mirror and I don\u2019t know who I\u2019m looking at.\u201d) No matter who sang what, Judy Garland\u2019s death\u2014and the question of whether MGM had encouraged her addictions\u2014would have hovered malevolently over the whole reunion: the ultimate Follies<\/i> ghost.<\/p>\n

When we spoke, Sondheim refused to entertain questions of how Joan Crawford and Bette Davis might have fared with his songs. \u201cYou\u2019re asking me to speculate,\u201d he said irritably. \u201cI can\u2019t answer that.\u201d He professed disinterest in queeny star worship, and added that \u201ceven as a kid, my interest wasn\u2019t in the actors so much as the filmmakers.\u201d However, Sondheim\u2019s lyrics to the 1954 song \u201cA Star is Born\u201d betray a devilish, obsessive command of movie star trivia, and he told me about a gin rummy game he\u2019d once devised with handmade movie star cards, \u201cin which you have Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo together, from Grand Hotel<\/i>, and then I can steal it from you by either adding somebody from that movie, or from another movie. I used to play it with Tony Perkins.\u201d While Perkins became a friend, the character actors of Sondheim\u2019s moviegoing youth were still capable of paralyzing him with awe. In his first job, writing the 1950s TV show \u201cTopper,\u201d Sondheim worked with Lee Patrick (The Maltese Falcon<\/i>, Mildred Pierce<\/i>) and Leo G. Carroll (innumerable Hitchcocks). \u201cI knew all her movies, and I knew all his movies,\u201d explained Sondheim, \u201cbut I was just too shy [to ask them questions]. I should\u2019ve, and I wish I had. It\u2019s one of the things I regret in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In our conversation, this was the closest Stephen Sondheim got to wishful speculation. The fragrant possibilities of an MGM Follies seem dead to him\u2014as if Sondheim has mastered what Ben pretends to have mastered:<\/p>\n

\n

You take your road.
The decades fly.
The yearnings fade, the longings die.
You learn to bid them all goodbye.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To Sondheim, this is Follies<\/i>. He once said that the show was about \u201chow all your hopes tarnish and how if you live on regret and despair you might as well pack it up, for to live in the past is foolish.\u201d After hanging up the phone, I began to feel that I\u2019d inherited the scheme for a Follies<\/i> movie from its originators. They had moved on, and I was stuck in the past. John Springer died a few months after sending his little Follies<\/i> fever dream to the Times<\/i> in 2001, and I wonder if the man Sondheim dismissed as \u201ca fantasist, a romantic\u201d would have been more willing to speculatively riff.<\/p>\n

The history of theater is written by romantics who live in the past. When a production closes, we all become God to it; it exists only in communal memory, and is subject to endless sweetening, defacing, spit-shining. As Peter Filichia has pointed out, Follie<\/i>s is \u201ca veritable phantasmagoria,\u201d flawless only in the minds of those who saw the original cast. In the 2011 Broadway revival, everything besides the songs seemed clunky and cloddishly realized. Still, walking out of the theater, I remember thinking that a few decades of nostalgia might lug the production all the way to transcendence. The MGM movie of Follies<\/i> has never been seen; it is total phantasmagoria. Because of that, it may be the show\u2019s perfect realization.<\/p>\n

Matt Weinstock lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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