FYNSWORTH ALLEY'S STAGE DOOR

JULY 31, 2001

RUPERT HOLMES

With his hit Broadway musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Rupert Holmes became the first person in theatrical history to be the sole winner of Tony Awards for Best Book, Best Music and Best Lyrics, with Drood also winning the Tony for Best Broadway Musical. After a record-breaking run in Los Angeles, the Broadway production of Holmes' comedy-thriller Accomplice starring Jason Alexander and Michael McKean won the coveted "Edgar" Award from The Mystery Writers of America. His tour-de-force for actor Stacy Keach, Solitary Confinement, also set a new Kennedy Center box-office record. For the last five years, Holmes has created and co-produced the critically-acclaimed, Emmy award-winning television series Remember WENN. His latest play based on the life of George Burns (produced with the endorsement of the Burns & Allen estate) entitled Say Goodnight, Gracie starring Frank Gorshin is an out-of-town smash and will be coming shortly to New York. Currently he is collaborating with Broadway legends Charles Strouse and Lee Adams on a musical adaptation of the Academy Award-winning motion picture Marty... finishing his own epic musical based on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray... and completing his first novel for Random House. Holmes' popular songs have been recorded by many of our greatest vocalists, most notably and frequently Barbra Streisand, for whom he has written, arranged, conducted and produced multi-platinum albums, including Lazy Afternoon and his songs for the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack of A Star Is Born. He is still probably best known to the general public as the singer and songwriter whose multi-platinum recordings include several Billboard #1 hits. Fynsworth Alley has just released a special Collector's Edition of his debut album, Widescreen, an album hailed by the New York Daily News as "the best of 1974." The new edition of this album includes eleven bonus tracks, including music from his plays Drood, Accomplice, and Solitary Confinement, his television series Remember WENN and Hi Honey, I'm Home! and the film No Small Affair.

What follows is an essay Rupert wrote for the liner notes of the new edition of Widescreen, plus a "10 Questions" interview Rupert did for this website last September. "There are songs that sound like movies ." WIDESCREEN (1974)

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It was Kipling who said that Success and Failure are both imposters, and we should all listen to Kipling, if only because none of us are ever likely to hear from anybody else whose first name is Rudyard. However, having in my life been bitten by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.

On the plus side, I've had Tony awards for a musical I authored and composed, Edgar awards for my Broadway thrillers, record albums with Barbra Streisand, hit pop songs and a TV series called Remember WENN that the critics loved almost as much as I did. I've also had successes that were in some way failures. I'm thinking here primarily of a huge #1 record of mine that my friend Rick Mitz once called "the smash hit that ended your recording career." Prior to this, I'd been a cult singer-songwriter generally well-regarded by some of the better vocalists and journalists of the seventies. Suddenly, a mass audience perceived me as a troubadour who'd dedicated his life to extolling the virtues of pineapple-based beverages.

But I've also had one or two failures that I've come to regard as being among my greatest successes. Case in point: Widescreen - which you should probably file under 'Lost And Found' as an apparent lost cause that found me greater opportunities than you or I or even our old buddy Rudyard could ever have imagined. To this day, it seems like one out of every five people I work with in the entertainment industry tells me they wore out the vinyl of this album in college, or when they first came to New York or Hollywood, or when their brother or sister turned their record collection over to them. Cast members of my plays will suddenly quote from "Letters That Cross In The Mail" . or the head of this very record label will burst into a memorable rendition of "Terminal." How did this first album of mine come to be? As they used to say over daiquiris at the Polo Lounge, let me give you the back story.

I'd been in the record business for about six months, although it would be at least another year before the record business learned of this news. I was twenty and thought the world was waiting for someone (me) to come up with The New Sound (as opposed to The Sound of about a week earlier). I knew there was nothing that a young man with classical training, a taste for pulp fiction and a total lack of financial resources couldn't do if he set half a mind to it. Now all I had to come up with was half a mind.

I knew I wanted to write pop music, where anyone's opinion of a song was as valid as anyone else's, but as a classical musician I hungered to work with all the instruments of the orchestra, not just electric guitars and drums. I also wanted to tell stories. Like everyone else in America at the time, I was interested in making movies . but I was also particularly fond of the few remnants I'd heard of the Golden Age of Radio. The last gasps of this audio-only story form had been available to me as a boy on Sunday nights up through the year 1960, via CBS Radio's Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. I had loved listening in a dark room, collaborating with the actors and scriptwriter by supplying the visuals myself. Someone astutely noted that Superman was a lot more credible flying on the radio than on TV. On radio, you couldn't see the wires holding him up. Not seeing was believing.

These were among the many things I wanted to do as the 1970s began. As I would say in one of the songs I was to write for A Star Is Born: I didn't want much. I wanted much more. In fact, I wanted everything.

It was one of those New York summers when the city had become a kiln and the paint on the buildings threatened to run like ceramic glaze in the scorching heat. I walked through the visibly-rippling air, taking shallow breaths so as not to scald my lungs. I finally gave up and did a sideways swan dive into a movie theatre - "It's KOOOOOL inside" beckoned the trademark penguin of a well-known menthol cigarette. The theater's dark lobby felt like I'd plunged into the deep end of a well-shaded pool. I took my seat and submerged myself in the movie that was just starting: You Only Live Twice, the fifth of the James Bond films with Sean Connery. The movie's title theme song (composed by the unfailingly wonderful John Barry) featured approximately eight hundred violins in a descending descant that commenced on a stratospheric B above high C, and Nancy Sinatra commenced to sing the best vocal of her entire recording career. I was totally, blissfully happy.

How incredible it must be to write the theme song for a motion picture, I thought. Of course, no one was likely to ask me to do so in the next day or two, especially while I was so enviably busy writing copyright lead sheets for the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and creating piano arrangements for the Charley Pride Song Folio at eight dollars a song. Yes, I was a purported composer with some self-taught notions about how to orchestrate for cinematic instrumentation, but no one was exactly knocking at my door. If you'd seen the apartment I was subletting at the time, you wouldn't have knocked at my door either.

Then a thought wandered across my mind (undoubtedly enjoying the chance to have the whole place to itself).

What if you were to write movie theme songs for films that had never been made?

In the same instant, I realized I could take this thought even a step further . what if the song itself was the movie? The lyric would serve as scenario and script, the arrangement and recording techniques would be the cinematography. You could employ sound effects, even dialogue if required. And instead of using the same band for every cut on an album, why not use whatever instrumentation each song called for?

There were practical challenges to this idea, of course. It would be impossible (at least back then in the days before polyphonic synthesizers) to perform such an album live at The Bottom Line or The Roxy, so forget about any promotional touring. But after all, these would be "movies in sound," the finished product. I thought at the time, if Richard Burton were plugging Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on The Tonight Show, would you ask him to reenact his major scenes with Ed McMahon, intriguing as that might actually be?

Admittedly, the FM radio stations would surely condemn the use of orchestral "underscore" as being too middle of the road or even Mantovani. And as a writer, I knew the lyric would have to tell a clear, cohesive story, which meant I'd have to forget about speaking symbolically or metaphorically. Farewell as well to the identically-worded repeat chorus at the end of the verse, a requirement of most hit songs of the era - but hey, I wouldn't be writing a song, would I. I'd be writing a record.

From that afternoon on, and for the next few years, within the incredibly limited scope of the opportunities that presented themselves, I tried to write songs that told stories. When given the chance to write a song for The Partridge Family - incidentally, Fynsworth Alley's guiding force Bruce Kimmel was a recurring character on this series - I came up with a sweet ballad called "Echo Valley 2-6809" that used a recording of a telephone operator for its finale. When I was asked to write a song for a struggling rock band named The Buoys in order to gain them some attention, I custom-penned a tune about cannibalism during a mining disaster. (I had seen Suddenly Last Summer the night before, was working on an arrangement of "Sixteen Tons" for Andy Kim and had The Galloping Gourmet on my TV when I wrote it - absolutely true.) The record was called "Timothy" and despite being banned in much of the country, it made Billboard's Top Twenty and became my first genuine hit as a songwriter. Its follow-up "Give Up Your Guns" was a mini-western that featured my first "widescreen" string arrangement; while not a big hit in the U.S., it was to top some European charts a decade later.

And so for a few years, with this notion of "film rock" (a catch-all phrase for my story-songs that also wore my cinematic orchestrations on their record sleeve) I eked out just enough of a living to justify this idea I had of a sound and a style for my work.

Then in 1973, I had the good fortune to work at Media Sound Recording Studios and meet a young recording engineer named Jeffrey Lesser, who was also a fine musician, a soulful vocalist and one really funny guy. While mixing a single for a now-defunct record label, we talked about what we'd love to do in the world of recording. A few weeks later on a Saturday when the studio wasn't booked, we very casually sauntered into Media's Studio A and secretly recorded demos of three songs I'd written, all in the same light pop vein in which I'd already had some small success. Thanks to A&R exec Stephen Paley and label chief Don Ellis, we finagled ourselves a very lowball deal to record three innocuous pop singles for Epic Records, with my voice fronting a non-existent studio group, just as I'd done for some smaller record labels.

But as the session date approached, I realized this might be the first, best and only chance I'd have to record something more personal, maybe even a bit more widescreen for a quality record company. So I wrote and recorded a song called "Terminal" to be one of the three singles we turned in. It was definitely different from what Epic Records had commissioned and expected and I thought they might be angry that we'd deviated from our agreed assignment. But instead, Epic asked if they could release "Terminal" as a single under my own name, as a recording artist on their label. I swallowed hard and said that for that, they'd have to give me an album deal. They said no. I said no. They blinked and offered the vast sum of $30,000 for a debut LP.

Jeff and I put every cent of that budget into the album, not pocketing a penny for ourselves. It took nine months to record and we'd have spent twice our budget if I hadn't supplied the arranging and Jeff the engineering for free. We'd start our session at ten PM, work until eight in the morning, and put down on the Media Sound time sheet that we'd left at midnight, so that we'd only get billed for two hours of studio time. I suspect that Bob Walters, the man who ran Media, knew what we were up to all along but chose to look the other way simply because he liked us and the music we were recording. Thanks, Bob.

And so this album was created in that final grace period before a pop single was considered naked without a video. It had 56 musicians and even a handful of actors. Unfortunately, the people who had signed me to Epic had moved on to Columbia Records before Widescreen was completed and very few of the remaining executives knew who I was or why I was on the label. Many thought Widescreen was a comedy album. Only ten thousand copies were pressed. In those days, an album that sold a hundred thousand copies was considered a bomb, so Widescreen was never even in the running for failure.

But the New York Daily News picked it as one of the top ten albums of 1974. Writers like Stephen Holden, rock artists like Flo and Eddie and - hard as it may be to believe now - rock magazines like CIRCUS and CREEM praised it. Thanks to publicist Susan Blond, I started getting covered by Andy Warhol's Interview. WNEW-FM and several progressive rock stations in L.A. and Boston decided to overlook my orchestrations and put the album in heavy rotation. "Our National Pastime" became a huge airwave hit on the BBC in England, despite the song being about three topics uniquely American: singles bars, baseball and "The Star-Spangled Banner." Craig Zadan at The Public Theatre started playing the album for Broadway producer Joe Papp -

And then I got a call from Barbra Streisand. Saying she had heard the album. Was interested in recording some of the songs. Thought I should do the arrangements. Maybe Jeff and I could produce the sessions. The next thing I know I'm sitting in Barbra's home in Malibu and she's singing along with my album. Without the lyric sheet.

Little more than a year after recording the songs on this CD, I had an office on the Warner Brothers back lot and spent my first lunch hour wandering the standing street sets that eerily resembled the cover of Widescreen. I turned the corner of Shangri-La, headed west through old Bohemia past some generically cosmopolitan boulevards en route to the dirt streets of Tombstone. A heartless sun casually beat the chemical haze of LA down upon me. A studio employee was touching up a mock New York brownstone and the dripping paint dried instantly in the oven-like heat. It was as hot as the hottest summer afternoon in midtown Manhattan. I reflexively turned for shelter into a movie theatre I was passing, but realized it was simply a façade. If you could have seen me at that particular moment, I'm sure you'd have noticed a dazed expression on my face as I realized the irony of where I was and what had gotten me there.

10 QUESTIONS
WITH
RUPERT HOLMES

You're both a writer and a performer. Are you more comfortable in one than the other, and how do those roles affect each other?

Let's make those questions one and two.

One: in all my years of performing, no audience member has ever actually assaulted me. I consider this to be the singular triumph of my performing career. I did win "Best Performance" at the Yamaha World Popular Song Festival and I assumed I'd receive a motorcycle. I got a medallion instead. It burns very little gas.

The truth is, I initially became a singer-songwriter while still in my teens because it was the only way to guarantee that somebody on earth would sing the songs I was writing. Since then, I've performed just about everywhere: rock clubs, concerts halls, arenas, TV. when I wrote the score for the movie No Small Affair they also had me play a bandleader who had five lines of dialogue with Demi Moore. (When people ask me what the film was about, I shrug, "Oh, it's about a bandleader.")

So I've always been comfortable performing. But if I had to choose between being a performer of other people's work or a writer of words and music for other people to perform, I'd definitely opt for the latter.

Question two: I believe my experiences as a performer have greatly influenced my work as a writer. My years in clubs and cabaret make me very at ease with my characters playing to the audience, either directly or self-reflexively through the text. In addition to this, many of my plays (as well as my TV series Remember WENN) have, in one way or another, been about actors putting on a show. I suppose this is because actors do so professionally and skillfully what most of us do much more ineptly: adopt facades to hide and protect who we really think we are.

I once had a small role in one of my own plays, a thriller which happened to become a big hit on the West Coast. Its run was extended month after month and thus for over a year I found myself living the life of a stage actor: eight shows a week, with only one day off, a day dedicated solely to recovering from the five-show weekend I'd just turned in... knowing that no matter where on earth I might be at six PM, at seven-thirty I'd be checking in with the stage manager... making my two hundredth "first" entrance and searching for a way to make the play feel new not only for the audience but for myself as well. It was a wonderful and massively humbling experience. Because of this, I always try to listen very intently when an actor has a problem with a line or a moment in one of my scripts. I know from my own performing career what it's like to be out there on a stage, alone. When the much-missed Wilford Leach accepted an award for directing Drood, he said to the audience, "I thank you for this award... and I thank God for the actors." Hear, hear.

What are the differences between writing songs for your albums and songs for the theatre?

When you write a song for a contemporary album, you are writing for the world the way it is at this very moment and you must speak the language of the day. If you dared these days to write,"I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again," a squad of MPs from MTV would pull you over and take away your artistic license.

When you write songs for the theatre -- particularly if you are also the author of the libretto -- you can create any world you want. and then you get to write the songs that people who live in that world would sing.

Having written songs for radio and songs for musicals, I think writing for a world one has invented can be infinitely more interesting than writing for the world we've all inherited.

What CDs are currently in your CD player?

On my five CD turntable, I have – honestly - the advance copy of The Stephen Sondheim Album on your own label. Terrific. The New Radical’s CD. The first Lost in Boston collection from Varese Sarabande. Howard Hanson’s Romantic Symphony. And the newly-issued Rupert Holmes' Greatest Hits from Universal, just in case I should at any moment of the day forget the lyrics to "The Pina Colada Song." You have be prepared for emergencies.

If you had to choose one song to be remembered by, what would it be and why?

In the pop medium, I suppose a ballad of mine called "The People That You Never Get To Love." The spectacularly splendid Susannah McCorkle, Margaret Whiting and Amanda McBroom were among the first to record and perform the lines: "You're browsing through a second-hand bookstore / And you see him in Non-Fiction V through Y / He looks up from World War Two and then you catch him catching you catching his eye / And you quickly turn away your wishful stare / And take a sudden interest in your shoes..." et cetera. Probably as good a pop lyric as I know how to write (especially that part about 'et cetera'). Barbra's renditions of "Letters That Cross In The Mail" or "Lullaby For Myself" would also more than suffice as my musical epitaph.

For theatre, "Moonfall" from The Mystery of Edwin Drood is as pristine a melody as I've ever written, with a lyric that turned out to be exactly what I hoped for: repressed, aroused, Victorian, erotic, frightened yet abandoned. It's been wonderful to hear Patti Cohenour, Judy Kuhn, Rebecca Luker, Judy Collins, Lorna Dallas, Barbra Streisand and literally hundreds of marvelous "Rosa"s around the world each make the song their own.

You've written in so many different genres of music, not to mention plays, musicals, and television shows. Do you have a favorite genre to write in?

Nothing to me is as exciting or rewarding as writing for the stage, whether it be musicals or straight plays. The fact that one's entire story is reborn each evening at eight PM for a new assembly of strangers... the illusion that the jokes are being invented fresh on the premises of your plot by the actors. the possibility that the actors may discover something new in a line of dialogue they've delivered a hundred times before. while a thousand different factors (ranging from the unexpected thunderstorm outside the theatre to the hurried dinners now rumbling in the audience's stomachs) put an always unpredictable spin on the reception your "immutable" script receives... no wonder Theatre will be celebrating its third millennium around the time that Movies celebrate their first century.

I must rush to add that I feel the Remember WENN series belongs as much to Theatre as to Television. With one (albeit huge) standing set, no laugh track, no commercials, a regular cast of Broadway's best, guests like Jason Alexander, Phil Bosco, Greg Germann, Malcolm Gets, Joe Grifasi and Irene Worth, and the chance to write songs for Betty Buckley, Carolee Carmello, Patti LuPone, Donna Murphy, Amanda Naughton, Peter Noone and Mary Stout (note that I've named all the above in alphabetical order), I consider the fifty-plus scripts I penned over the last five years to simply be the world's longest one-act farce. I've never been happier than writing Remember WENN.

You're currently writing the book of the musical Marty. What's the experience like, and how is it different from writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

I'm working with three lifelong heroes: Charles Strouse, Lee Adams and Paddy Chayevsky. Despite my awe, Charles and Lee are both so charming and funny that I occasionally forget that these are the guys who together wrote "Put On A Happy Face," "Once Upon A Time," All In The Family's theme song and Golden Boy. Why, sometimes I forget for as much as four or five minutes. You can't imagine what it's like to sit as the sole first audience to what they've come up with since our previous meeting. And I get paid to do this?

More challenging is to rework the late Paddy Chayevsky's classic script into a stage musical. I try wherever possible not to rewrite his words. I'm most at ease creating new scenes with his memorable characters that may be better suited to the musical format... scenes that I hope sound and feel as if they might have taken place in Chayevsky's screenplay but simply not in front of the camera.

How do you feel about workshopping musicals?

I don't like the practice and try not to do it unless it's solely for the benefit of the creative team. Sometimes I feel that the last good thing to come out of a workshop was Pinocchio. Not the movie. The dummy.

What is the one Broadway show you wish you had written?

So many. And play or musical? We're not even considering Hamlet, The Homecoming, Uncle Vanya or James Barrie's What Every Woman Knows, are we? Even hypothetical questions have to be grounded in some reality. I'm sure Cecil B. DeMille wishes he had written The Bible, but as far as I know he only took credit for the screenplays.

Okay, in the category of non-musicals that debuted on Broadway in my lifetime, I certainly wish I'd written Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged or Anthony Schaffer's Sleuth. Both are gorgeously constructed and genuinely witty, with lots of nasty currents lurking darkly beneath their gleaming ice rink surface. Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound would be right up there too but I only saw it off-Broadway.

Musical? Well, we all wish we'd written My Fair Lady or West Side Story, don't we? Everyone at my Tuesday night poker game does. I'm told my first words as a child were, "Did I write My Fair Lady? I didn't?? Damn!" I also consider David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and Frederick Knotts' Dial 'M' For Murder to be musicals, so beautifully do they sing.

You've worked with a lot of big personalities: Barbra Streisand, Jason Alexander, Betty Buckley, Cleo Laine. What are the special challenges (or joys) of working with stars?

Fran Leibowitz once advised all whimsical, innovative chefs that if two thousand years have gone by without anyone adding lime to mashed potatoes, know that there is a reason for this.

The first challenge of working with a star is to remember that if they are admired by millions of people, know that there is a reason for this. Not only that, but the star often has a very keen grasp of what they do, what is at the core of their appeal, how their stardom came to be and what material would be inappropriate for them. You need to listen very attentively and thoughtfully to what they have to say. They are right far more often than they are wrong.

Some stars are like twelve-year olds who for Christmas have been given a thermonuclear device. The above stars are not examples of this, I'm thankful to say. Generally, I've found the more talented the star, the more reasonable they are to work with. An extremely big star once complimented me, and when I thanked her, she shrugged, "Hey, when you have it, you can give it away." Try not to catch a falling star, though, unless they have a sense of humor about the vagaries of show business. When they go for a supernova, you may find yourself standing in the blackest hole in all creation.

Why haven't you written a musical since The Mystery of Edwin Drood?

I was asked this question by David Shire a few weeks ago and, perhaps because we have much in common, I found myself giving him a more open answer than I've given this question in the past.

My usual (and not dishonest) answer has been that it took me almost four years to write the book, music and lyrics for Edwin Drood and four more eye-blearying months to pencil all the orchestrations myself. It is daunting to start another musical, working alone, knowing that its completion may be half a decade away. I had also longed to write a one set, two act, four actor thriller, which I did with Accomplice (which followed Drood to Broadway, as did my tour de force for Stacy Keach, Solitary Confinement). Hollywood then sang me its mandatory song of seduction, as it has to promising playwrights for decades, and I was paid several princely sums to create a number of movie scripts that may yet see the light of day-for-night photography. Then along came Remember WENN. I wrote the pilot, and unwittingly but happily committed to spending the next five years creating scripts for as superb a repertory company as I've ever written for, comforted by the knowledge that any given episode was being seen by more people than viewed Drood in its entire Broadway run.

All the above is the truth, but it's not that simple.

What I rarely talk about - because for the last decade it has simply been too difficult - is that a few months after the bliss of winning the Tony awards, my ten-year-old daughter Wendy died without warning from an undiagnosed brain tumor. At the time, she was being treated by some very bright doctors who believed she was anorexic. One morning she awoke with a severe headache and before the afternoon was over, she was gone.

If the Fates had wanted to rob me of everything I could ever love and treasure, they couldn't have done better than to give me (and then forever deprive me of) Wendy, who was just the most witty, gentle, sensitive, beautiful child. Even more crushing was the thought of the lifetime Wendy had been deprived of.

For several years after that, I went through the motions of living, but you don't ever want to know what that life feels like. Still, I had others to support, so I sought shelter in my work. Writing came back to me but there was something too painful about composing music. You can somewhat protect yourself against words, since they are specific and concrete, but there's no way to filter out the emotions evoked by abstract music. It became too painful to compose because life hurt too much to sing.

In all the years that followed, I never gave up music completely, but could only create it within a very limited context. I had a few pop hits (recorded by other artists) which were actually revamped from songs I'd written before Wendy died. I also wrote quite a bit of incidental music for my stage thrillers, but again, that was music that served a clear dramatic function: comic, or suspenseful, but rarely poignant.

The passing of time and Remember WENN helped me find my way back. First it began with composing the underscore for the series. Invariably toward the end of each episode, I would find myself inventing some lyrical theme to accompany a wistful speech I'd penned months earlier. It was almost like writing a song. Then I found myself writing original songs for cast members and guests to sing in different episodes. Soon Remember WENN was filled with more music than any other non-musical TV series on the air, and before I knew it, I was writing words and music together again. I like to think some of them are songs Wendy might have hummed to herself as she went about the life she might have lived.