Sherman On the Boardwalk

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-912620-36-4
Verlag: Inkandescent
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 278 Seiten

A memoir from the writer of BENT with a foreword by Ian McKellen Sherman takes us on a journey through America in the mid twentieth century, starting in New Jersey - where he was born in the 1930s to a Jewish immigrant family - ending on Broadway with the premier of his seminal play Bent starring Richard Gere. On route, we encounter other famous performers including Meryl Streep, Bee Gees, Joan Baez, but the scene-stealing character is always his father - a charismatic narcissist who might have given Trump a run for his money. We stop off in Woodstock, Los Angeles and London - a city Martin would eventually make home; he relays his story with self-depreciating humour as he struggles to make it in theatre, with his sexuality, and under the shadow of the inheritable disease that killed his mother tragically early - a disease from which he finds himself finally free, as he turns forty in the book's closing pages.

Martin Sherman was born in Philadelphia, raised in New Jersey and educated at Boston University. He has lived in London for over forty years. He was a resident playwright at Playwrights Horizons in New York and a member of the groundbreaking theatre company Gay Sweatshop in London. His plays have been produced in over sixty countries and include Bent (twice in London with Ian McKellen and once with Alan Cumming, on Broadway with Richard Gere), Messiah (West End, with Maureen Lipman), When She Danced and A Mad House in Goa (both West End, with Vanessa Redgrave), Some Sunny Day (Hampstead Theatre, with Rupert Everett), Rose (National Theatre and Broadway, with Olympia Dukakis) and Onassis (West End, with Robert Lindsay). His stage adaptations include E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, a new version of a Pirandello play, Absolutely (Perhaps!) (directed by Franco Zeffirelli, with Joan Plowright), and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (Los Angeles, with Annette Benning and Alfred Molina, and Windsor, with Ian McKellen and Francesa Annis). He wrote the musical The Boy From Oz (Broadway, with Hugh Jackman). His latest play Gently Down the Stream premiered in New York at the Public Theatre. Rose was revived recently in the West End with Maureen Lipman. Martin's screenplays include The Clothes in the Wardrobe with Jeanne Moreau, Joan Plowright and Julie Walters; Alive and Kicking with Jason Flemyng, Anthony Sher and Bill Nighy; the film version of Bent with Clive Owen, Mick Jagger and Ian McKellen; Franco Zeffirelli's Callas Forever with Fanny Ardant and Jeremy Irons; The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone with Helen Mirren and Anne Bancroft; Mrs Henderson Presents, directed by Stephen Frears, with Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins. He has been nominated for two Tonys, two BAFTAS and two Oliviers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sherman, Martin

Leseproben

2

Anne Baxter descended a staircase in a smoke-filled Parisian bar. She was slightly overweight. She was drunk and not in control. She almost fell. Her body was moving in too many directions at once. She was broken and clearly had no idea how to put herself back together. Her name was Sophie. The band played ‘Mam’selle’ in the background. I was convulsed, but literally convulsed with tears. My body was heaving. My heart was shattered. I was eight years old. I was in a movie theatre watching The Razor’s Edge and it is the first time I encountered a beautiful, subtly maternal woman who has no control over her own fate. Let alone control over her own physical behaviour. A woman who is headed for disaster.

I went to the movies all the time when I was a child and it was only when a character like Sophie appeared that I was moved. Not just moved; destroyed. The most potent example was Ava Gardner in Showboat, playing Julie—the mixed-race chanteuse who drinks too much and slurs her words and is just possibly the most beautiful and lovable woman ever filmed but who is clearly going to end up in a trash can. My reaction to Julie was even more potent when I read the book (by Edna Ferber) several years before. I have literally never cried as much in my life, before or since, as when Julie ascends a staircase into shadow, disappearing from the narrative, indeed from her narrative, into oblivion. The fact that the character shared my mother’s name made no conscious impression on me, nor did the fact that my reaction to all of these tragic characters was triggered by the equally tragic but not dissimilar ‘something’ that was occurring to my mother. Clearly, in some subterranean level of consciousness, I did know what was happening.

Often it was a role that moved me, but sometimes it was just the actress. And what now seems scary is that I could seemingly sense a tragic woman before she became tragic. I saw Patricia Neal onstage in The Children’s Hour in 1952 when I was fourteen; her beauty and her voluminous eyes and her ever-cracking voice profoundly upset me. I became obsessed with her and it was impossible for her to do anything, no matter how trivial, without shattering me. I saw tragedy written on her forehead in invisible ink. This was many years before she lost one child to measles, had another child brain damaged in a freak accident, and nearly died of a massive stroke. It was dangerous for an actress to be liked by me: it meant there was a sadness they were either hiding or didn’t yet know about; they were, almost always, moving towards an uncomfortable destiny.

Which may be one explanation for my otherwise confounding passion for Carmen Miranda. It’s easy to pinpoint it as an early inclination towards camp, and indeed it did not foretell heterosexuality, but it was much more than that. Has anyone ever been able to account for Carmen Miranda? The Brazilian Bombshell. The fruit she wore in her headdresses equalled about three smoothies. Her platform shoes were skyscraper tall. She mangled her English and sang in Portuguese and her eyes rolled so manically it looked as if she was permanently coked. Which, in fact, she was. I loved her unreservedly.

It started when I was about five. I watched her films over and over, hoarded her records and scoured magazines for her image. One of the few times my father ever got demonstrably angry at me was when I kissed Carmen Miranda’s photograph in a newspaper. He said he thought newsprint unhealthy to kiss (he was right), but surely he was more concerned with this bizarre obsession his son had? Other kids were playing baseball. I was kissing Carmen’s hat in the Courier Post. The secret behind my infatuation was perhaps revealed when she removed her headgear. Which was rare. And when she did, she usually wore a turban. But in a few of those early 20th Century Fox Technicolor extravaganzas there were brief sightings of Carmen’s hair, and beneath it, Carmen’s face, not obscured by all the flimflam. She looked like my mother.

As her film career began to fail, she turned to nightclubs and she came to Philadelphia to perform at the Latin Casino in 1951. I begged my parents to let me attend. They usually gave in to me, and this was no exception. My father, who never attempted a macho image, nevertheless found it a little galling to accompany a thirteen-year-old to a nightclub to see someone whose persona was dangerously close to a drag queen’s; so he left it to my mother to take me. As usual, I can remember what she did, but nothing she said to me. Nonetheless, we must have made an interesting couple that night at the Latin Casino; after the show, we were taken backstage. Carmen Miranda and my mother together! Freud would have been amused. Carmen wore a bathrobe, not a banana in sight. She was tiny. And exhausted. Having to be a ball of energy twice a night wearing a heavy headdress and back-wrenching platform shoes, performing the same songs again and again, songs that no one in an increasingly drunken audience understood (literally, no one ever had a clue what she was singing about), knowing that with each excessive South American gesture she was making herself more unwanted in her native land, had taken its toll. She had passed her sell-by date. She was stuck in celluloid, trapped inside, and anything else this extraordinarily gifted woman may have had to offer wasn’t in any way up for discussion. She looked at my mother with envy, took her hand and told her how lucky she was and said the greatest tragedy of her life was that she was unable to have a child. And then, Carmen Miranda kissed me.

She suffered the curse of my adoration. In August 1955, she was taping a Jimmy Durante television show. She fell to her knee during a dance number but got up immediately and continued. That night, at home, she had a fatal heart attack. She was forty-six. You can see her fall during the song on YouTube. It must have been her first heart attack of the evening. Thanks to the advances of modern technology, you can watch her begin to die. I was sixteen. It was the first time I had experienced death—except I hadn’t experienced it, because I didn’t know her. Although I had been kissed by her. I sat shocked and depressed on our porch. My mother said nothing. My father came home and said, ‘Oh yes, it’s sad,’ and then called me in to dinner.

My movie-going years started at an obscenely early age. I don’t remember the first film I saw. It might even have been one with Carmen Miranda. My parents went with me at the beginning. (They couldn’t afford babysitters—my father’s peculiar finances inclining toward more public expenditures—and anyhow, a babysitter meant there was a stranger in your house.) But then I was quickly allowed to go on my own. I saw films I shouldn’t have been seeing and films I clearly didn’t understand. (The Razor’s Edge at eight?) I think both of my parents had decided it was good for me to be out of the house. They were right. So I grew up with Technicolor fantasies, with South American singers in tutti frutti hats, with Norwegian ice skaters (Sonja Henie, one of my favourites—needless to say, she died unexpectedly in her fifties), with Arabian princesses (Maria Montez, who even a child knew couldn’t act, but was compulsive nonetheless—she had a heart attack in her bath at thirty-nine), with cowboys—who, try as I may, I was never able to care about—and soldiers and swashbucklers and noirish detectives. I had huge crushes on Gloria Grahame (washed up and dead at fifty-seven), Veronica Lake (washed up and dead at fifty) and, naturally, Judy Garland (washed up and dead at forty-seven). Marilyn Monroe caught my attention when she was playing bit roles, not because she jingled my hormones, but because she broke my heart. Actresses like Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert, who I grew to love as an adult, left me cold as a child because they were clearly in command of their lives. They weren’t about to fall down the stairs. War films, which glorified uncertainty, frightened me and I had to leave a dreadful B movie called Paris Underground when bombs were about to fall on Paris and Gracie Fields. But if a hunky soldier took off his shirt, I didn’t notice the carnage—although I had absolutely no idea why I was interested.

The film that moved me above all others was The Search—directed in war-ravaged Germany by Fred Zinnemann—about a little Czech boy who is searching in the rubble for his mother; the film intercuts the boy searching in town after town and the mother searching in town after town, and in the end, miraculously, they find each other and are reunited. The film was exquisitely made; but that’s not why I saw it over and over—the ending always reducing me to a well-soaked dishrag. The mother was played by an Eastern European opera star named Jarmila Novotna who looked just a little like… well, you know. Films about fathers and sons never moved me in an equivalent manner.

Reading was another drug. It wasn’t something one did in school. God forbid! The only novel I can remember being assigned in my entire Camden academic career was A Tale of Two Cities. After that, we were on our own. The American education system was appalling; that was the real scandal my father should...