Patti LuPone— A Memoir. By Patti Lupone with Digby Diehl. Crown Archetype, 2010. 324 pages, with index. $25.99.
I’ve been doing Theater Books of the Week for a month now and I haven’t gotten to Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat yet? Thought it’d be nice to offer up Patti LuPone’s new autobiography first. In the same way that theater junkies have waited a lifetime for a book by Sondheim, LuPone waited her whole career for a shot at performing some of the key female roles in the Sondheim canon. She got her wish like crazy—multiple Sweeney Todds and Gypsys since the turn of the 21st century—each on Broadway, but also for Chicago Ravinia festival, where she’s also gotten to do Anyone Can Whistle, Passion and Sunday in the Park With George.
I remember seeing LuPone perform at the grand reopening of the Garde Arts Center in the late 1990s. This was an era when Frank Sinatra was called upon to be the first concert at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville and Liza Minnelli christened the new year-round indoor Oakdale Theater in Wallingford. The Garde was smaller and scrappier than the other swellegant venues of that time, and I thought LuPone was an ideal booking for the Garde’s rebirth. She had the same spunkiness and diverse up-down-up background as the Garde, and she dressed up real nice. She can go from snappy to slinky within the space of a single song.
…or a single chapter, as this book shows. It’s not a detailed and deep tome by any means (hence the “memoir” appellation rather than the more austere “autobiography”). But it’s plenty passionate and eager to explain the plentiful exasperations of LuPone’s long career. Since her own outspokenness has, over the years, helped frame what we think we know about her, this is a wonderful longform opportunity for her to explain and defend herself.
Some of the defensiveness seems eminently justified. After Evita made her a Broadway, she found it hard to re-establish herself as a dramatic stage actress, and you feel for this woman who’d done scads of Mamet and serious regional theater no longer being welcomed in that realm. Meanwhile, Evita wasn’t exactly pro forma Broadway—politically minded, supremely difficult to sing, rather sparse compared to the coming wave of high-tech musical/lightshows. LuPone was a woman without a country. When she found herself on a hit TV series, Life Goes On, the thrill was muted because she’s felt a lack of chemistry with her on-screen husband from the very first audition.
On the other hand, LuPone is prone to protest too much, and you really start wanting to hear someone else’s side. The famous tale of her getting hired to be Norma Desmond in the London world premiere of Sunset Boulevard, then denied the chance (even though it was guaranteed in her contract) to open the Broadway production as well, is exactingly related by LuPone, yet considering how stringent she is with contracts and agreements throughout her life, it’s hard to fathom all the “I was never told…” aspects of her story. There are numerous bits in the book where she glides over what was probably considered abhorrent behavior at the time—forgetting to give castmates opening-night gifts, for instance—with weak excuses about her frame of mind. You get the sense that she wants to counter every accusation ever made against her, without giving readers a full sense of what the fuss was about in the first place. Co-author Digby Diehl, the L.A. arts journalist who also worked on the autobios of Esther Williams and Natalie Cole, is genius at arranging a text which really feels like it came straight out of LuPone’s mouth, but he can’t fill in the gaps if she won’t.
In any case, this is an excellent time for LuPone to be telling her story. The arc of the book is that she was always a precocious performer, producing musicals in parking lots as a kid, appearing on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour (the famed TV competition which she reveals was rigged), and getting into Juillard with an audition she herself describes as “flippant.” The struggles which follow are not so much with fame as with control over which roles she wants to be most identified with and how much input she has into how to play them. The memoir culminates cleanly and naturally with her Broadway success as Mama Rose in Gypsy—an opportunity which involved not only having to resolve a decades-long stand-off between her and the show’s director and original bookwriter Arthur Laurents, but having to re-interest Broadway audiences in Gypsy just a few years after Sam Mendes had directed his own maverick production with Bernadette Peters.
This Gypsy highpoint frames LuPone’s narrative. Here’s the book’s first couple of lines:
I’ve opened Gypsy four times. The first time, I played Louise (aka Gypsy) in the Patio production of the musical. I was fifteen years old.
That circularity is augmented by another recent expression of her daring and devilishness—when she played tuba as Mrs. Lovett in John Doyle’s brash Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd. The tuba was her childhood instrument of choice. Despite its self-serving lapses, this memoir is all the more resonant for how it connects Patti LuPone’s childhood dreams with her adult ones. Also for how it eclipses all her presumed prima donna pettiness with her desire for highly principled performances.