Flashback, April 2013: Broadway Legend Stritch Bids Fans Farewell at Cafe Carlyle

Bold and brassy Elaine Stritch, who became a theater legend with performances in musicals by Rodgers and Hart, Noel Coward, and Stephen Sondheim—then made audiences laugh with an acclaimed one-woman in which she interspersed songs with reminiscences of these and other show-business luminaries—said goodbye to the cabaret world she had once conquered with a sold-out, five-night gig at the Cafe Carlyle in early April 2013.

I wrote a tribute to Stritch following her death in July 2014, but this particular engagement seemed too poignant not to discuss in more detail. It brings to the fore a question most fans wish they never have to confront: Should favorite entertainers take their last bows at a point when their skills have already visibly deteriorated? In other words, what kind of memories do they want to leave their audiences?

Celebrities—including Tom Hanks, Tony Bennett, Liza Minnelli, Martin Short, Michael Feinstein, Mandy Patinkin, and Bernadette Peters—came out in force in April 2013 to pay tribute to the 88-year-old actress, who had already announced that, due to a variety of ills—diabetes, eye troubles, falls leading to a hip replacement, and small strokes—she would not only cease performing but return to her native Michigan, to be near her nephews and nieces. 

Most accounts of the engagement followed the line laid out in a review by influential New York Times critic Stephen Holden: pay tribute to her irrepressible spirit, but inform those about to attend what they could expect: “For the truly faithful, just being in Ms. Stritch’s presence was enough, but a cabaret performance it was not, and the show’s dearth of music did seem to leave some unsatisfied.”

In one sense, Holden was perfectly correct: Stritch’s friends were more than willing to overlook the inevitable frustration and shortness of memory that their beloved “Stritchy” exhibited.

In truth, she probably had the group in the palm of her hand with her first lines: “Isn’t this fantastic, what a star I am? I mention I’m going home, and I’m a star immediately! This used to happen with my boyfriends—as soon I’d say ‘I gotta go home now’ they fell in love.”

Stritch first made her name in the 1952 revival of Pal Joey, in which she gave indelible life to the number by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart about an insouciant stripper. Several years later, she impressed Noel Coward in her appearance in Sail Away.

But she became a talent impossible to ignore in Sondheim’s Company. That landmark 1970 musical provided numerous solo opportunities for its cast members to shine, but arguably none made a bigger impression than Stritch, who helped make the title of her big number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” an instantly recognizable catchphrase for women of a certain age seeking to match their marital disappointment with “another vodka stinger.” 

The force of Stritch’s incendiary performance in that tale of urban couples fumbling through the Age of Aquarius might have been ephemeral but for the original-cast album. A long-shelved TV documentary by D.A. Pennebaker about those painstaking recording sessions detailed the actress’s continued ineffectual attempts to recapture for vinyl the magic she had had little problem summoning nightly—as well as her eventual triumph, after being sent home to rest. 

From the various accounts of those last Carlyle shows, it seems clear that the small, intimate band of listeners on those early spring nights knew better than to expect songs delivered in a strong voice from a steel-trap memory. (Even the frequent prompting of her faithful accompanist, Rob Bowman, wasn’t always enough to get her through.)  

“This is the kind of show where we don’t know what is going to happen,” the actress said. That sense was confirmed later in the evening when Stritch admitted that she was so scared before the show that she had had half a drink, then again when she couldn’t always control the reactions of the room. 

Nevertheless, they had come, from what many may have guessed might be the last time, to say thank you to a salty force of nature who had given them stories and memories they would dine out on for the rest of their lives. 

Given Stritch’s reputation as a stage performer, I was surprised to see from her listing on the Internet Broadway database that there was a 20-year hiatus between Company and her next appearance on the Great White Way, in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. 

Although some of that time was in London, during her marriage to John Bay, she made the most of one short appearance: the 1985 concert revival of Sondheim’s Follies, where she delivered—what else?—a close-to-definitive rendition of “Broadway Baby.” (Sondheim would continue to play a major role in her midlife-to-late life reinvention, as she appeared for the last time on Broadway in his A Little Night Music and made his “I’m Still Here” an integral part of her one-woman show.) It was easily enough to get her inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1995.

I hope that some writer even now is at work on her biography, interviewing those who knew her while some are still alive and their memories are fresh. In the not-so-distant future, I wouldn’t be surprised if some short-sighted millennial editor at a publishing house dismissed her as being only of local interest. Stritch lived a vivid, exuberant, but complicated life, and it would be a shame if her bright flame were extinguished amid a fickle posterity.

(For a vividly impressionistic account of Stritch’s next-to-last performance, see Sarah Larson’s piece in The New Yorker.)

The accompanying photo of Elaine Stritch was taken at the Creative Arts Emmys on Sept. 12, 2009, by Greg Hernandez (Greg in Hollywood).

Bawdy Broadway Baby: An Elaine Stritch Appreciation

Around 20 years ago, I was attending a book appearance and signing by Elaine Steinbeck at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. All was going swimmingly, as the widow of John Steinbeck, with easy humor rolling from her southern accent, effortlessly demonstrated why the Nobel laureate had fallen in love with her more than four decades before.

Then a man in the audience, remarking on her active social life, began a question: “As one of the ladies who lunch…”

I groaned as soon as I heard that last phrase. He might have meant it innocently.

But Ms. Steinbeck, a onetime actress, was, I was sure, intimately familiar with what the phrase had come to mean after its use as the title of one of Stephen Sondheim’s songs in his 1970 musical Company: a clique of middle-aged women with plenty of money and time on their hands with nothing better to do than hurl zingers in between downing vodka stingers.

Sure enough, Ms. Steinbeck took umbrage at the thought of membership in such a group. If her questioner wasn’t properly abashed after her response, he had no emotional intelligence whatsoever.

Now, if another Elaine—Elaine Stritch, who passed away at age 89 this past Thursday—had heard the question, the fellow would have been lucky to make it out of the auditorium alive. 

“Stritchie,” as she was nicknamed, had already spent two decades in the theater when she entered Broadway legend as Joanne in Sondheim’s epochal show. She poured a lifetime of acid wit and one too many mornings of hung-over self-loathing into her much-married, seen-it-all, caustic character. 

When she commanded, at the end of the song, “Everybody rise,” everybody obeyed—then stopped the show with thunderous applause.

In the more than 40 years since that performance, countless actresses have played Joanne. But Stritch had long ago set the prototype for the character.

Stritch was a character in her own right, an actress who brought her own fire and mordant humor to every role she played. It’s easy to think that channeling that swagger came naturally.

Just how much it cost her was suggested by D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on the recording of the original-cast album of Company. At the end of a marathon recording session, she continually, inexplicably muffed her interpretation of the song. 

Sondheim, Stritch, and record producer Thomas Z. Shepard could barely repress their exhaustion, stress, annoyance and embarrassment until Shepard told the actress to go home, sleep, and come back when she was rested. 

Stritch did so, a day or two later, though not without stopping for drinks to fortify her. This time, she nailed it.

That scene revealed everything you could ever want to know about how even a talented, accomplished theater professional could be so insecure as to verge on total ineffectuality. 

As a teenager, Stritch discovered the magical and dangerous impact of alcohol on her personality: Nobody need ever know that she was, at heart, shy and nervous.

As an adult, Stritch found alcohol a help for coping with anxiety about performing. She quit in the mid-1970s after the onset of diabetes. 

But, as she prepared to retire from the stage in her late eighties, the old insecurities returned, and for awhile—until health complications set in again—she permitted herself a glass or two of alcohol.

By that time, of course, she had become an icon of the stage, particularly in works by Sondheim—not just Company, but, the mid-1980s Follies in Concert (where, even in an all-star cast, she brought the house down with “Broadway Baby") and A Little Night Music. 

And her Tony-winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2002),  reviewed the events and personalities in her life, including an improbable convent education (though not so improbable when one recalls she was the niece of a Roman Catholic cardinal), the men she got (Ben Gazzara, Gig Young, husband John Bay), and the men who got away (JFK, Marlon Brando, and her closeted Farewell to Arms co-star, Rock Hudson).

The closing years of her career spread her fame beyond the bright lights of Broadway, with appearances over several seasons as Colleen Donaghy, the tough handful of a mother to Alec Baldwin’s network exec on the sitcom 30 Rock. That was not her first foray into TV work, though. 

Before that, she had appeared in the TV movie version of Steel Magnolias (as tart-tongued Ouiser Boudreaux, of course), The Ellen Burstyn Show, Two’s Company (a British comedy series with Stritch as a bestselling American author who deals with a wry butler), and The Trials of O’Brien (with the actress playing secretary to Peter’s Falk’s Columbo prototype, a rumpled defense attorney). 

I saw an episode of the latter at New York’s Paley Center for Media, and on YouTube there’s an entire episode of the early Sixties sitcom adaptation of the old Broadway hit My Sister Eileen, with Stritch as the appropriately cast witty writer Ruth Sherwood.

“Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” Bette Davis observed in her declining years. Stritch, a kindred spirit, would no doubt agree.

Reviews of her last cabaret shows at the Café Carlyle read like obituaries, trying to pay appropriate tribute to a New York institution while gingerly acknowledging that she forgot lyrics, stepped on punchlines, and turned on audience members when they laughed at times she deemed inappropriate. (See, for instance, this New Yorker blog post from a year ago by Sarah Larson.)

The same reviews indicate that audiences overlooked those last flawed shows. 

Fans preferred to remember and celebrate the brassy, whiskey-voiced blonde in long white man’s dress shirt, black vest, and black tights who had made a personal anthem of survival of another Follies standard, “I’m Still Here.”

Now—sadly—she isn’t anymore.

Quote of the Day (Stritch, on Brando)

“Marlon’s going to class to learn the Method was like sending a tiger to jungle school.”—Actress Elaine Stritch on Marlon Brando, her fellow-student of acting teacher Stella Adler

(The always quotable Ms. Stritch is cited in Claudia Roth Pierpont’s article “Method Man,” appearing in this week’s New Yorker. The magazine, bless its chintzy little heart, has not posted the full text online, in keeping with its policy of only putting some pieces from each issue up. You can see an abstract here, then, if you want, either shell out the dough at the newsstand or—if you’re looking to economize in these troubled times—look it up at fine libraries everywhere—a prospect that, as what is called an “information specialist”, I certainly have no objection to.

In any case, Pierpont hasn’t produced a radical reconsideration of the man who, it’s commonly agreed, transformed American acting, but she does include—besides the lovely quote from Ms. Stritch—some details about the actor’s life that I, for one, did not know. Did you realize, for instance, that John Garfield was originally considered for Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, until his demands led director Elia Kazan to look elsewhere?)