Famed playwright and director dies at ninety-three
Famed playwright and director dies at ninety-three
Arthur Laurents '37 died in New York City on May 5. This profile of him appeared in The 100 Most Notable Cornellians by Glenn Altschuler, PhD '76, Isaac Kramnick, and R. Laurence Moore, published in 2003 by Cornell University Press.
In giving serious attention to street gangs and racial prejudice, West Side Story violated the "sacred code of show business: musicals are for nonthinking joy." Author of the books for West Side Story and Gypsy, two outstanding Broadway musicals, Arthur Laurents '37 won acclaim as a leading dramatist, librettist, and screenwriter in the second half of the twentieth century.
Arthur Laurents was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 14, 1918, the son of Irving Laurents, a lawyer, and Ada Robbins Laurents, a teacher. As a teenager at summer camp, Arthur became "wildly stagestruck" after he was picked for a part in The Crow's Nest because he was "agile enough to climb up the mast of a ship and bright enough to remember some lines." While a student at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, he regularly attended the theater in his neighborhood as well as in Manhattan.
In 1933, Laurents entered Cornell. With encouragement from Raymond Short, his freshman English teacher, he decided to become a writer rather than to follow his father into the legal profession. A theater major, Laurents (who would be dubbed "the meanest mouth in show business") was not impressed by the faculty or the curriculum in the department. The reading course he designed for himself, The Socially Conscious Drama since 1848, was, he thought, "one of the pathetically few [classes] I took at Cornell that I enjoyed or from which I learned anything." When Professor Alexander Drummond advised students never to begin a play with a telephone ringing, Laurents defied him by writing a first act that did just that. He knew he was declaring war, but dismissed Drummond as a "casually overt anti-Semite." Not surprisingly, Drummond suggested that Laurents give up playwriting.
Although Laurents remembers his undergraduate years with little affection, they were formative. As assistant editor and drama critic of the Daily Sun, he wrote regularly about topics that interested him. As a member of the liberal-socialist American Student Union, he gained firsthand experience with progressive politics and red-baiting. He also met Fannie Price '37, the frizzy-haired Young Communist Leaguer, whom he would later make the model for Katie Morosky, the heroine of his film The Way We Were. In 1937 Laurents attended the peace strike organized by the Young Communist League, which featured placards calling for "Peace at Any Price, Except Fannie Price."
Following graduation, Laurents performed in a nightclub revue and wrote a few radio scripts. When the United States entered World War II, he enlisted in the Army. Assigned at first to a paratroop unit at Fort Benning, Georgia, he spent most of the war writing scripts for military training films and radio scenarios about the rehabilitation of veterans and the problems of returning servicemen. Drawing on his research in veterans' hospitals, Laurents wrote his first Broadway play, Home of the Brave, in 1945; it's the story of an Army psychiatrist and a Jewish soldier whose amnesia is the result of guilt over the death of his possibly anti-Semitic buddy. Praised by some as bold and important, the play closed after sixty-nine performances. In 1949 United Artists released a film version of Home of the Brave, rewritten as an exploration of prejudice against blacks rather than Jews.
After his next play, Heartsong, flopped during pre-Broadway trials in 1947, Laurents moved to Hollywood. He produced the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), wrote a script for Anatole Litvak's The Snake Pit (1948), and worked on Caught (1949) and Anna Lucasta (1949). Laurents returned to Broadway in 1950 with another flop, The Bird Cage, but scored an impressive hit two years later with The Time of the Cuckoo, a comedy-romance set in Venice that is about the relationship between an American spinster—brilliantly played by Shirley Booth—and a married Italian shopkeeper. The play was subsequently turned into a film, Summertime, with Katharine Hepburn, and a musical comedy, Do I Hear a Waltz?, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
Blacklisted in Hollywood as a "fellow traveler" for much of the Fifties, Laurents fled to Paris. In mid-decade, he returned to the Broadway theater. Despite a fine performance by Kim Stanley, A Clearing in the Wood closed after less than a month in early 1957. In the fall, however, he was part of a great Broadway triumph. West Side Story—with music by Leonard Bernstein, the book by Laurents, lyrics by Sondheim, and conception, choreography, and staging by Jerome Robbins—electrified audiences. Laurents won praise for updating the story of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, seamlessly integrating the dialogue and plot with the music, creating for the Anglo Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks the "talk of the juveniles, or a reasonable facsimile," and weaving it into "a magic fabric."
Following the success of West Side Story, Gypsy, with lyrics by Sondheim and score by Jule Styne, enjoyed a two-year Broadway run, spawned a film that was a smash hit, and became one of the most frequently staged musicals in the United States. Based on the memoirs of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, Laurents's libretto concentrated on Gypsy's ambitious, overbearing stage mother, played by Ethel Merman. In 1973 Laurents directed a revival of Gypsy, this time starring Angela Lansbury, for which he earned a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award.
The Sixties were somewhat less kind to Laurents. He directed a musical comedy version of Jerome Weidman's play I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962, a musical remembered only because it marked the Broadway debut of Barbra Streisand. Two years later he was librettist and director for Anyone Can Whistle, a show with music and lyrics by Sondheim that lasted for only nine performances. In 1967, Laurents wrote the musical libretto for Hallelujah, Baby!, which examined race relations through the lives of a young black couple played by Leslie Uggams and Robert Hooks. Despite lackluster reviews, the show ran for nine months, and Laurents picked up another Tony.
In the Seventies Laurents scored his biggest commercial successes with screenplays for The Way We Were (1973) and The Turning Point (1977). The Way We Were allowed Laurents to explore the anticommunist witch hunt in Hollywood during the Fifties, through a romance between Streisand, playing a left-wing intellectual, and Robert Redford, playing a WASP novelist. Columbia Pictures considered, then rejected, Cornell as the setting for Katie Morosky's college days.
Acclaimed as "literate, mature, and compelling," The Turning Point featured stellar performances by Anne Bancroft, as a prima ballerina on the verge of retirement, and Shirley MacLaine, as a talented dancer who gave up her career to raise a family. The film earned Laurents an Oscar nomination for best screenplay.
A gay man, Laurents took special pleasure in directing La Cage aux Folles (1983), the musical about the homosexual owners and transvestite stars of a night club in Saint-Tropez. He worked hard to insure that "people and emotions" remained at the heart of this often bawdy play. A box-office smash, La Cage aux Folles won six Tony Awards, including best musical.
Laurents remained active in the Nineties, writing several plays: Nick and Nora (1991), a musical; Jolson Sings Again (1995), a treatment of the Hollywood blacklist; The Radical Mystique (1995); and My Good Name (1997). Although none of them found an audience, Laurents became the center of attention again, in 2000, with the publication of Original Story By, a candid, acerbic, even fierce memoir of his life in the worlds of art, love, and politics, that concludes, "I'm still sexual, still skiing, still crusading . . . [and] I have begun a new play, of course."