** * * * * * * * * * *
STAR DELI
the most important and
influential American
musicals of all time: West
Side Story and Gypsy.
Laurents explained
that West Side Story was
supposed to be about the
conflict between Jews
and Christians, but that
since there were few
Jewish gangs around in
the late 1950s it was
more realistic to spotlight
the Italian and Puerto
Rican communities.
Another one of
Laurents' accomplish-
ments is jump-starting
Barbra Streisand's career
by giving her the lead in
the Broadway show I Can
Get It For You Wholesale,
IS ONE OF THE BEST CARRY OUT ONLY
RESTAURANTS IN AMERICA!
An Excerpt
"Original Story By" is fill of
juicy anecdotes about major
Broadway and Hollywood fig-
ures. Here, Arthur Laurents
describes an episode that occurred
during rehearsals for "Gypsy" for
which he wrote the book:
kt‘1704744. ; ,. I :ANNIZO:pge:
ORIGINAL
STORY
BY
She may not have been the
.A .r t h
smartest but Ethel Merman
knew what she sang and what
Laurents
she didn't sing. Singing was
her security She used it to
counterbalance her numerous
insecurities, beginning with
the fear someone might think she was Jewish. One
nonrehearsal day in Philadelphia, [lyricist] Steve
[Sondheim] and I ran into Ethel wandering around
the city. We asked what she had been up to.
"Praying for the show," she hastened to add,
'In church!"
About a week later, it was Passover-Easter and
[composer] Jule [Styne] decided to give a seder
for the principals in the company. Ethel pan-
icked: "What'll he serve? What can I eat?"
Not a Christian baby I wanted to say but "capon"
was all I -did say. "Capon. That's chicken, Ethel."
She arrived at the seder, fresh from the hair-
dresser, sedately turned out in a little black dress,
carrying a small black purse. Jule beamed with
pride as he led her to the seat of honor in the
center of the long table. She sat down, opened
her chic bag and took out a ham sandwich
which she put on her plate.
At rehearsals, Ethel always had a turkey sand-
wich with Russian dressing. Jule went livid. She
was his star but it was his seder; her ham sand-
wich fouling his plate could not be ignored. He
picked it up, threw it on the floor and said:
"Ethel, you're insulting the waiters!"
Then, behind her back where she couldn't see
him, he broke up. That was Jule. But Ethel was
Ethel; always a great sense of her audience. When
the music Jule arranged for began after the seder,
she unobtrusively — and it was next to impossi-
ble for Ethel Merman to be unobtrusive — made
her way to the piano and began to sing: songs
from her shows, requests, old favorites. She kept
singing for almost an hour: When she finished,
she had won back everyone she had lost.
which he directed.
His description of
discovering Streisand's
"calculated spontaneity"
-- she pretended to put
a wad of gum under her
chair before her singing
audition — and her
magnificent talent at the
same moment is price-
less. Laurents' and
Streisand's careers inter-
sected again in The Way
We Were, which was
based on his years at
Cornell and during the
Hollywood witch hunt.
Although Laurents
isn't and has never been
either religiously obser-
vant or involved with
Jewish organizations, his
book is full of small
observations about
being an American Jew
of a certain generation
and profession.
He notes, for instance,
that a theater professor at
Cornell "had no com-
punction about begin-
ning a sentence with you
Jews,''' which, coupled with his dis-
missal of Laurents' talents, only made
Laurents more determined to succeed as
a writer.
A trip to Israel in the 1960s also
caused Laurents to declare that "Jews
are notoriously anti-homosexual."
"I'm anti-religious, actually.
Organized religion is terrible, certainly
historically. More people were killed in
the name of God than anything else,"
he explains. But in the same breath he
notes that "I love Jews. Jews are juicy
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... And [because of their history] per-
haps Jews are more sensitive to one
another, to mankind."
Laurents also admitted that very
recently he began to be aware of "some
kind of higher power" in the world.
"This awareness came too late in
life, but it has made my life infinitely
better," he added. "You stop trying to
be in control. You don't abdicate
responsibility, but you realize you can't
do it all. You do what you can. I write
now for the joy of writing. And what-
ever happens after that happens." ❑
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81