Quote of the Day (Rita Moreno, on Jerome Robbins, ‘Tough and Demanding Daddy’ of ‘West Side Story’)

“A lot of the dancers hated him [director-choreographer Jerome Robbins]— but loved him. He would think nothing of making us do one step over and over until we broke down in tears or pulled something. Shin splints for days. He was a tough and demanding daddy, but if you got a smile out of him, you floated on air for days.”—Oscar-winning actress Rita Moreno quoted in Joe McGovern, “Making West Side Story’s ‘America,” Entertainment Weekly, July 7, 2017

Jerome Robbins was born 100 years ago today in Manhattan. I had written a blog post several months ago about his agonized decision to inform on friends during the McCarthy Era, but that was hardly enough to sum up the career of this extraordinary if imperfect artist.

Inevitably, I turn back to West Side Story, even though Robbins’ many accomplishments predated and followed that landmark 1957 musical. It would have been enough that he brought it to fruition on Broadway, but he also was instrumental in its translation to film in 1961, and he was a co-winner for Best Director for his efforts. (Altogether, with 10 Academy Awards, the film would be one of the most honored in Hollywood history.) In a sense, the opportunity to work in Hollywood—and on such a prestigious project—helped motivate his controversial 1953 testimony as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Yet the uncompromising nature that enabled him to make West Side Story such a stunning Broadway success also ensured that he would not complete production of the movie. Moreno’s remarks above only hint at what a taskmaster he could be. The location shooting in what would become, in a few years, Lincoln Center took place over a grueling summer. 

“In New York it was, like, 110 degrees,” Russ Tamblyn—who played "Jets" gang leader Riff—recalled in this YouTube clip of his appearance at the 55^th anniversary of the movie. “And we had to do this long dance down the street where we were walking and dancing and we had to do it over and over and over, and they had to keep shooting,,,And finally, [co-director] Robert Wise would say, ‘Well, that’s fine for me….How ‘bout you, Jerry?’ And Jerry would say, ‘Well, I’d just like to do one more, but I’d like all of you dancers to do it on the other foot.’ I don’t know if you know what that means, but instead of stepping out to the left, you step out to the right. You had all of these dancers trying to figure out what to do. So it took a long of time.”

But what short-circuited Robbins' involvement with the project was how he treated his collaborators and studio executives: with dismissive contempt. He rebuffed multiple suggestions from Wise (tasked to direct non-musical sequences) and screenwriter Ernest Lehman on how to translate scenes from the stage to the screen. 

At last, when the film was $300,000 over budget and only one-third of the expected footage was in the can, United Artists decided to fire Robbins--a decision made easier by a clause in his contract that few thought would ever be invoked, that allowed for his termination if the movie wasn't working out. With rumors flying that the film would shut down completely, that was the opening that United Artists needed. 

It says something for Wise’s forbearance that, even when it came to this pass, he still went to bat for his troublesome collaborator.To be fair, though, it also says something for Robbins’ brilliance. In his autobiography, composer, arranger, and musical director Saul Chaplin, for all his criticism of Robbins' cruelty and sadism, still had to acknowledge him as "by far the most exciting choreographer I had ever watched. He seemed to have an endless stream of exciting ideas.”  

Remember that the next time as you watch the movie’s choreography, all of which Robbins managed to complete before his ouster. And the musical numbers he finished—"Prologue," "America," "Cool," and "Something’s Coming"—still bristle with energy and fire, giving viewers a visceral sense of the violent youthful passions that end on New York’s mean streets.

This Day in Broadway History (Robbins Ducks Blacklist by ‘Naming Names’ to HUAC)

May 5, 1953—After three years of dodging inquiries into his past membership in the Communist Party, the threat of exposure of his homosexuality led Jerome Robbins to inform on eight people before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The decision to “name names,” the product of his terror over homophobia, drove a wedge between the rising dancer-choreographer and the associates blacklisted because of his action.

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Robbins, the taskmaster and perfectionist who left indelible marks on both Broadway and American ballet. He had already collaborated with the equally young composer Leonard Bernstein on the jazz-infused dance piece Fancy Free and the Broadway musical that sprang from it, On the Town. As a dancer, he had enthralled New York City Ballet audiences in George Balanchine’s Prodigal Son and Tyl Ulenspiegel, as well as with his choreography of such works as The Guests, Age of Anxiety, and The Cage. His innovative choreography for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I lent an unexpected element to that musical. 

Another choreography assignment, this time for Wonderful Town, brought Robbins further success. But only three months after that musical premiered, Robbins ended up informing on that show’s book writer, Jerome Chodorov. 

In later years, Chodorov was forgiving toward his old theatrical collaborator: “I never was bitter about Jerry, because I figured in those days a homosexual was very vulnerable...Jerry was a weakling, but he was a very talented weakling. And I don't think he did it out of viciousness. He did it out of fear. That's my personal feeling. He didn't want to hurt anybody. He certainly didn't want to hurt himself."

But Chodorov was unusual in his live-and-let-live attitude. More typical was Robbins’ sister and brother-in-law, who were so appalled by the testimony that they would not speak to him for more than two decades. 

To understand the depth of the bitterness Robbins aroused, it should be remembered that he not only informed, but, unlike several of the so-called "friendly witnesses," did not warn those friends he named before the committee. Moreover, he informed on an unusually large number of people—some being what HUAC craved the most: new names not identified before. In addition to Chodorov, the eight included:

* Madeleine Lee Gilford, an actress and activist, who had taught Robbins “the lindy” as he was preparing Fancy Free;

* Lloyd Gough, an actor;

* Elliot Sullivan, another actor, in the hearing room at the time of the testimony; 

* Edna Ocko, a dance critic who had been his friend ever since she had favorably reviewed his Frankie and Johnny in 1938; 

* Lettie Stever, who worked in the office of Robbins’ agent Dick Dorso and had recruited the choreographer into the Party;

* Lionel Berman, a filmmaker; 

* Edward Chodorov, Jerome’s brother, and a playwright, author and film producer in his own right.

After testifying, Robbins, sitting on a sofa, said to playwright Arthur Laurents, “It’ll be years before I know whether I did the right thing.” Laurents, his best friend, was much more certain: “I can tell you right now, you were a shit.”

However stung he may have felt initially by the remark, Robbins’ feelings about the matter later tended to agree with Laurents. In his journal he wrote, “Maybe I will never find a satisfying release from the guilt of it all.”

While there were some who felt that Robbins was primarily motivated by ambition in informing, the general consensus followed Jerome Chodorov’s line that Robbins wanted to conceal his sexual orientation from the public. Edward Chodorov, not as forgiving as his brother, was one. Told by Jerome that Robbins had named them (remarkably enough, without any prompting from the committee), Edward responded cynically: “Stabbed by the wicked fairy!”

What were Robbins’ alternatives to informing? He could have simply remained on Broadway as he had been doing. A number of blacklisted actors, writers and directors were able to choose this route because theatrical funding was more diffuse than in Hollywood and, thus, less likely to boycotting by pressure groups such as the newsletter Red Channels. 

But work in the theater was more sporadic and not as well-paying as the movies. If Robbins hoped to make it to Hollywood—as he would do, triumphantly, in the not-so-distant future—the film world would be closed out to him. Aging out as a performer, with choreography jobs harder to come by, he might have had to become simply a dance teacher.

But exposure of his homosexuality was simply nerve-racking to him. An engagement to dancer Nora Kaye (with whom he was then living) would have helped only temporarily in providing protective cover for his orientation. But Ed Sullivan, who was sympathetic toward HUAC, had already threatened him with exposure in his newspaper column for his lifestyle. 

In those pre-Stonewall days, public knowledge of his true orientation would have wrecked Robbins’ career. The impact of being “outed” (a term not used at the time) could readily be seen outside the entertainment industry, for instance, in the “Lavender Scare” of the time. Though running parallel with the “Red Scare” at the time of Robbins’ testimony, it extended longer and caused more lasting damage to those in national security positions. Thousands of workers were driven from the federal workforce from the late 1940s into the 1960s because of their sexual orientation.

So Robbins testified. As a result, Madeleine Lee Gilford, and her husband, the comic actor Jack Gilford, saw their film and TV work disappear through the end of the Fifties, forcing them to survive “mostly on unemployment insurance,” she said later.

Over a half century later, the Gilfords’ travails would be chronicled, in thinly fictionalized terms, by their son Joe. Robbins (who, before he died in 1998, burnished his Broadway legend as director of both West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof) appears in the script as “Bobby Gerard.”

The play’s title gives a sense of the opprobrium that Robbins, despite his reputation as a dance genius, earned for his testimony: Finks.

This Day in Theater History (Bernstein & Co. Change Direction on “West Side Story”)

August 25, 1955—At a poolside meeting in Beverly Hills on his 37th birthday, Leonard Bernstein (in the image accompanying this post) and creative partners Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents shelved their previous idea for a modern musical version of Romeo and Juliet—a clash of Catholics and Jews—in favor of a different set of characters: Anglos and Mexicans in Los Angeles. 

The switch was a pivotal transition point along the way to the violent “rumble” between native Anglo and immigrant Puerto Rican gangs that formed the crux of the landmark musical West Side Story.

Before the musical opened on Broadway in September 1957, it spent eight years being brought to life. In January 1949, director-choreographer Robbins proposed, as Bernstein noted in his diary, “a noble idea—a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebrations….It all fits…but can it succeed?” 

Several years later, by their own admission, the answer was no. Librettist Laurents identified the problem eventually: the premise for what was then called East Side Story was simply a rehash of the 1920s comedy Abie’s Irish Rose, except without the laughs. 

(Two decades later, TV was more shameless about reworking an old idea, bringing to life Bridget Loves Bernie, with eventual husband-and-wife Meredith Baxter and David Birney.) 

So here Bernstein and Laurents were, soaking up the sun, when the composer suggested: “What about doing it about the Chicanos?” (That very day, in fact, the Los Angeles Times had a headline about gang warfare.) Excited, the two men called Robbins, who agreed. 

Before long, the concept did a transcontinental flip, partly because Laurents felt more comfortable with New York-based Hispanics than those in California, so that now it was about Anglos and Puerto Ricans on the West Side of Manhattan. 

Running like a thread through the whole thing, from start to finish, was the idea Bernstein had scrawled on the title page of his annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet in the early going: “An out and out plea for racial tolerance.” 

Some years ago, I remember hearing longtime New York deejay Vin Scelsa call West Side Story the first rock ‘n’ roll musical—or rather, he quickly qualified it, not so much the first musical with rock ‘n’ roll music but the first musical born of the spirit of rebellion that animates rock ‘n’ roll.

He was onto something: rock ‘n’ rollers did see something of themselves in the great musical tragedy. Todd Rundgren, for instance, did a live version of “Something’s Coming,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” features a teenage clash with inevitable echoes of the musical. 

But more basic to the musical than the idea of the rebel is that of the outsider. If they could move so easily from Jews to Mexicans to Puerto Ricans as the out-group, the quartet that created West Side Story—Bernstein, Laurents, Robbins, and, joining them that fall, the young lyricist Stephen Sondheim—were not just outsiders, but double outsiders.

All four were not just Jews—a group all too painfully aware, from the events of the previous decade, of their precarious nature in the world—but homosexuals. However well-known their sexual orientation might have been to entertainment professionals, it was a more closely guarded secret to the world at large. 

(In fact, Bernstein had married a woman, at least partially in the unsuccessful hope that by doing so he would sublimate his attraction to men.) 

In this context, the most heartfelt song for the quartet might have been “Somewhere.” Sondheim’s plaintive words and Bernstein’s soaring melody summon “a place for us,” where “We’ll find a new way of living/We’ll find there’s a way of forgiving”—a vision they must have felt still elusive in that age.