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PART TWENTY-FOUR |
At left, the resourceful Ray Golden, who promoted "Quirks" into a series of new venues in Los Angeles under the new name "Mixed Nuts." At right, the cast of "Mixed Nuts" acting like escapees from a Fun House. |
Retooled edition of 'Quirks'
opens in Hollywoodland
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
Morrie Bobrow,
my collaborator on our stage show “Quirks,” and I finally
took to calling it “the little revue that could” because
it refused to close after playing at a hole in the wall on Clement
Street in San Francisco for a year. Then it moved to a seedy
ex-strip joint in North Beach, the Chi-Chi Club, where it ran
six months prior to heading for its opening in Los Angeles.
This was a heady time for me. "Quirks" first opened in 1979, just before I joined The San Francisco Chronicle. I was reviewing, writing an entertainment column and flying to L.A. on weekends to dabble in show business. Somewhere in there I also was divorced.
The instigator in “Quirks”’ move south was the unforgettable Ray Golden, a one-time everything--Broadway sketch writer, Hollywood screenwriter, songwriter, director, producer and all-around joyful, irrepressible spirit. He was full of jokes, stories, opinions and puns, also an endless reservoir of show biz lore that Morrie and I lapped up, prodding him with questions. We were easily the best audience Ray had ever had.
Scouting shows that he might bring to Los Angeles and direct, Ray had stumbled in to see “Quirks” one night, liked it and came back a few more times before shyly approaching us about staging the show in Los Angeles. He had lived in L.A. “week to week for 30 years,” as he phrased it, refusing to put down roots because he still considered himself essentially a New Yorker. He somehow eked out a living with, I suspect, the aid of his wealthy son-in-law, Richard Baer, who wrote for “All in the Family” and other hot sitcoms of the time.
Ray Golden was an aptly named golden boy who beamed when he talked about show business, his passion, and, even in the face of dire theatrical fate, always exuded humor and can-do optimism. Show business hadn’t treated him very well, but he didn’t mind. He so loved being a part of it that he was willing to exist on its fringes, happy to be alive and kicking, to recall one of his New York shows. He played tennis into his late 70s. Until lifelong asthma finally defeated him at 81, he was always tanned and bouncy, ready for action.
Ray’s major stage credits were a couple of Broadway revues, “Alive and Kicking” and “Meet the People,” for which he’d written songs and sketches for young unknowns like Gwen Verdon and Joel Grey (“I knew him before he had his nose fixed,” Ray said), working alongside wannabe comedy writers Neil and Danny Simon and a variety of others who went on to have much bigger careers than Ray, who was content to labor in the trenches.
He had known everybody, from Jimmy Durante to producers Kermit Bloomgarten and Feuer & Martin, and never tired of recalling his experiences for us. His biggest film credits were “The Goldwyn Follies,” for which he wrote the lyrics to a song done by the Ritz Brothers, “Here, Pussy, Pussy!,” in which the trio croons to a lion amidst a collage of cats, and worked on the Marx Brothers movie, “The Big Store.”
All of which had provided Ray with a fund of rich, funny and fascinating stories that he regaled Morrie and I with over various meals as we hammered together a new version of “Quirks,” which Ray decreed needed a new name, “Mixed Nuts.” It was his name, which Morrie and I were lukewarm about but, as always, were talked into by Ray’s huge powers of persuasion and personality. His favorite ploy when we disagreed with his suggestions for a new line or lyric was, “Why do I have to drag you guys kicking and screaming into a hit?” We nearly always lost, unable to resist his charm and persistence.
Ray was over 70 when we met him, with a shiny bald head, twinkling baby blue eyes and a big grin. He always wore a turtleneck and a beret. He was a gifted guy but his true talent, his greatest creation, was himself. He had been married a long time to a little wife who was forever yapping at his heels, treating him like an errant son, which he was. He alluded to having had many affairs, but his wife took care of him, nudging him to take his pills and nattering away at him as he muttered a series of “Yes, dear's."
Ray was a survivor, for sure, and somehow met and cajoled a guy to produce “Mixed Nuts,” a heavyset former TV producer with a blunt, no-nonsense manner who had fallen under Ray’s spell. They had worked together earlier on a musical revue, “Mother Earth,” a save-the-planet show decades before its time. It hadn’t succeeded but they still were friends mainly because the producer had money to invest in Ray’s latest idea--our show.
That large crude producer guy was Roger Ailes, who survived “Mixed Nuts,” and Ray Golden and went on to become a media adviser to George Bush, a GOP consultant and the head of Fox News, which he largely created and guided to its current place of prominence. Roger is now one of Rupert Murdoch’s most trusted hands but was a lowly co-producer of “Mixed Nuts.” The other half of the producing team was an old high school classmate of mine, Paul Kameny, who had made money running a corporate language school that taught English to Chinese workers coming to America and Chinese to American employees going to work in China.
Kameny knew nothing about show business but was a sharp businessman forever appalled at Ray’s sloppy definition of bookkeeping. Golden kept dodging Paul whenever Kameny wanted to see the books. Ailes was much less hands-on, trusting Ray to get the show on its feet somehow, too busy with his other TV pursuits in New York. For Roger, our little show was a lark, but for Kameny it was a serious investment that drove him nuts when the books didn’t balance, maybe because there were no books.
Morrie and I were pretty much removed from the business side, too busy fine-tuning “Mixed Nuts”--reworking songs and sketches with Ray and holding auditions and then, finally, mounting the show at the tiny Cast Theater on a back street in Los Angeles, a theater we were told had been founded in part by Charlie Chaplin. It was an Equity-waiver house, meaning the cast wasn’t paid in lieu of providing them a showcase to be seen by agents and TV and film directors, producers and casting agents.
That was the theory anyway, but theater in movie-obsessed Los Angeles is an orphan, an underground art form that rarely surfaces amid the hot-house climate of the film, TV and pop music industries. None of that daunted Ray, who treated our little show as if it were only a few steps away from Broadway. His favorite line, whenever we went from one phase to the next was, “We’re moving up!”
For Morrie and I, it was a huge kick just to be working with Ray on a show that would be produced in Los Angeles. We were moving up. Morrie had written, directed and produced several shows in San Francisco but for me it was a first time; and it was the only time any of his shows had gotten this far, so it was also a big first for him, too.
“Quirks” was a traditional topical musical revue, almost an extinct form today and even then on shaky last legs, satirizing everything from banal TV weathercasts (mine was set in ancient Judea with a guy forecasting locusts, boils and early morning frogs), the Arab oil consortium (Morrie’s forlorn sheiks ruled over the only three non-oil producing countries), escort services (our girl played chess with a traveling salesman) and personals ads (two girls and a gay guy sing Morrie’s “Bi, Bi, Baby”), speed reading, dildos--all hot topics then) and a party of social-climbers at a party boasting of their chic affiliations (Radio Shack Battery Club, Auto Association, Columbia Record Club). Our blockbuster finale was Morrie’s doo-wop song sung by an ex-girlfriend of Pope John still carrying a torch for him).
Much of the fun, and most of the headaches, was sitting around with Ray going over lines, words, even syllables, and discussing casting and staging, for the opening at the Cast Theater. We wound up running a few weeks there (the Equity agreement prohibits a longer run in a theater seating more than 299 people), then moved to a second Equity-waiver production at the slightly larger, nicer Pan Andreas Theater, before finally moving up to a full Equity production at the Coronet Theater on La Cienega Boulevard, a nice old theater with about 500 seats, a little courtyard in front and an actual marquee.
Most of my memories are of us hunched over a breakfast meeting with Ray at some coffee shop or a Hamburger Hamlet, haggling over taglines to sketches and lyrics and rhymes, all of which he (and we) reveled in perfecting. Ray was an obsessive, staying awake nights trying to devise a better tagline or a new verse for a song that he would then announce at our next meeting with a great smile and a grand flourish, proclaiming, “Now you’ve got a song!” Or a sketch. Or a show. Morrie and I still use that line in endless ways, memorializing Ray. Twenty years after his death, he still makes us smile.
But Ray could be as exasperating as he was exuberant. He pretty much ran the show out of his battered briefcase that was stuffed with script rewrites, song sheets, actors’ resumes and photos, set designs, magazines, shopping lists, half-eaten sandwiches and candy bars--maybe even his passport and birth certificate. He traveled light. Most of the show he kept in his head, where producers Kameny and Ailes couldn’t get at it.
Auditions were the most exciting part for me, much different than auditions in San Francisco where you’re lucky to get 10 people to show up on time. In Los Angeles, we had upward of 50 people for each audition, most of them polished actors with few of the ragamuffin types that turn up at Bay Area auditions, some of them only a few notches above street people.
In L.A., of course, auditions are taken very seriously. A few of the performers had major credits, like singers Gloria Loring, Rosalyn Kind (Barbra Streisand's half sister) and Kelly Garrett and some I can’t recall--one of whom had played opposite Jerry Lewis in an ill-fated “Hellzapoppin” revival. Then there was the actress who turned up with a strainer over her head and greeted us, “Sorry but I’ve been under a strain all week.” She didn’t get the part but wound up as Ray’s assistant.
There were lots of pretty blond types among the men, and many of the sleek women looked like soap opera refugees. We wanted “real” faces, faces with character and, of course, great comedy chops, always hard to find. We managed to cobble together a non-Equity company for the Cast theater production, including a guy from our San Francisco show, Ira Grubman, and a pretty young girl with a lush voice, Leslie Hicks, from the American Conservatory Theater’s apprentice program.
The show got a positive mini-review in the Los Angeles Times and better full-length reviews in smaller papers, which encouraged the producers to keep writing checks that took us, finally, to the Coronet Theater Equity production, which would cost a bundle as it became a union show with actual costumes, a simple set, ads and a publicist.
Morrie and I, both with full-time jobs, would fly down on Fridays to see what damage Ray had inflicted on the numbers, and the staging, since the last rehearsal. Without us around looking over his shoulder, anything could happen. Sweet and funny as he was, Ray was also a major control freak (like most theater people) and also a mad tinkerer who was never quite finished fiddling with a sketch or a song. Roger Ailes told us that on the opening night of “Mother Earth,” at the Marines Memorial Theater, Ray was still whispering new lines backstage into the ears of rattled actors.
Ray was a better writer than director, relying too often on tired shtick dating back to vaudeville. The new name of the show itself, “Mixed Nuts,” sounded like a Three Stooges movie. The actors seemed to sense he didn’t quite know what he was doing, but he was too nice a guy to be a dictator, and somehow he whipped the show into shape.
Variety’s
guy showed up, along with Los Angeles Times theater critic
Dan Sullivan, whose praise we needed if there was any hope of
fanning “Mixed Nuts” into a real run. For our first
production at the Cast, the Times sent John Mahoney, a second-stringer
who got lost trying to find the theater and arrived midway through
the first act. Mahoney apologized and was decent enough to come
back the next night to see the show from the top and gave us
a nice review. “We’re moving up!” cried Ray.
For the Coronet production we came up with a smart looking cast
of six, at least two of whom--Connie Day and Paul Keith--we figured
would go on to great success, but none of them ever did. There’s
so much raw--and highly polished--talent in L.A. that all sorts
of truly gifted performers fall by the wayside, partly because
it’s almost impossible to get noticed doing theater in Los
Angeles.
Connie, Paul and our other four (Stacey Shaeffer, Michael Byers, Joey D’Auria, Rebecca Spencer) probably scratched out a modest living on the edges, but too many terrific actors in LA wind up in related fields--teaching, agenting, promoting, casting. New York is tough enough in its own grueling way, but at least there are tons of theater jobs there, a lively legit community--but also tons of terrific actors vying for them.
Even so, Morrie and I were proud of our
little show that could, even if Dan Sullivan’s lukewarm
reviews ended our dazzling foray into showbiz in a few weeks.
Sullivan’s review revealed that he hadn’t quite comprehended
the point of some of the numbers and he dismissed the best stuff
with faint praise. He didn’t seem to have an appreciation
of the revue form, perhaps wishing he was at “The Cherry
Orchard.”
Our budget was drained and we hadn’t put enough aside, like
bigger and wiser shows, to take out ads to counteract Sullivan’s
review and trumpet all the other good reviews from smaller surrounding
papers. I contributed $1,000 for one more ad, a last gasp before
the show was forced to fold its musical tent. Finally, some two
years after “Quirks” had opened on Clement Street,
the little show that could, couldn’t anymore.
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©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman
caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The photos from "Mixed
Nuts" are the property of the author and his co-producer.
This special extract from a work in progress is published by
special arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this
work should be directed to the author by use of the Talkback
feature below. This excerpt first posted here Aug. 6, 2007.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Gerald Nachman. To send
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