Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood - Hardcover

9780375400551: Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood
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Director, playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents -- author of Gypsy, West Side Story, Anastasia, The Turning Point, and other plays and films -- takes us into his life, and into the dazzling world in which he worked, among the artists, directors, actors and personalities who came of age in the theatre and in Hollywood after the Second World War.
He takes us into his boyhood in Flatbush and his days at Cornell, where he learned to write plays, learned he was homosexual, learned what his politics would be as he organized support for the Spanish Civil War and protests against campus witch hunts (these undergraduate years became the basis for The Way We Were). He takes us into his days in the Army as a sergeant (in Astoria, Queens), writing training films with Irwin Shaw, William Saroyan, John Cheever, sunbathing with Bill Holden and competing to see which of them could outdrink the other.
Laurents describes a wartime New York City that was vibrant, eager and sexually alive, where he wrote for radio (The Man Behind the Gun; Lux Radio Theater). He confesses his methods for devising plots: make a list of twists and turns from successful movies, number them from one to fifteen, choose at random and link them up. He describes the writing of his first successful play, Home of the Brave, about anti-Semitism (later made into a movie about racism by Stanley Kramer), and writes about getting on with pals -- among them Jerome Robbins (an imp who loved to play parlour games, the sillier the better; later he testified before the House Committee of Un-American Activities and named names), Leonard Bernstein and Nora Kaye, later Laurent's lover and beloved friend, then a new star in Antony Tudor's Ballet Theatre.
In and out of bed with men as well as women, in and out of success with his work, Laurents describes his Freudian analysis with Theodore Reik, who insisted he could "cure" Laurents of his homosexuality, and cure him of what Reik diagnosed as Laurents's "selfishness" by being paid "ten percent of vot you make." Laurents gave; Reik took.
We see Laurents going off to Hollywood, reporting for duty at MGM, then a "feudal domain, a prisonlike fortress behind stone walls" . . . driving up to Irene Mayer Selznick's house for the first time and having a sense of deja vu (he had seen it all before in MGM pictures of tastefully grand English country houses -- "No bulter but yards of maids") . . . writing the script for The Snake Pit . . . Laurnets playing volleyball and charades at Gene Kelly's with lots of liberal talk and pot-luck meals . . . playing in Charlie Chaplin's round-robin "Cockamamie Tennis Tournaments" . . . going for  a Memorial Day weekend sail with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy on a 125-foot yacht, Hepburn changing into identical spotless white ducks and shirts every hour on the hour with Tracy lolling in a chair, crocked the whole trip, and Hepburn patting pillows behind his neck . . . Laurents writing the script for Rope, a movie with three homosexual men at its center, just as he is beginning a long affair with one of the picture's stars, Farley Granger, as well as an intense, complicated but happy collaboration with the picture's director, Alfred Hitchcock . . . and being propelled out of Hollywood for a life in Paris when his agent, Swifty Lazar, tells him, "You're blacklisted, dear boy . . . the  studio said you're too expensive before I mentioned money."
Laurents writes about his return to New York and his smash hit play, The Time of the Cuckoo, with Shirley Booth, later made into a movie called Summertime with Katharine Hepburn, then into a musical (Do I Hear a Waltz?, with music by Richard Rogers, words by Stephen Sondheim). He writes about jump-starting Barbra Streisand's career by casting her in her first Broadway show, I Can Get It for You Wholesale ("There was one part available -- a fifty-year-old spinster. Streisand was nineteen. She came in with her bird's nest of scraggly hair and her gawky disorganized body, clumped across the stage, took her wad of gum out of her mouth, stuck it under the chair and began to sing; eight bars into the song, I knew she had to be in the show. I checked later, no gum"). He writes about the creation of Gypsy with Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim (Laurents to Ethel Merman: "Rose is a monster. How far are you willing to go?" Merman to Laurents: "I'll do anything you want.") . . .  about the directing of La Cage aux Folles . . . and about coming together in a complex, fraught collaboration with his three old pals Robbins, Bernstein and Sondheim for West Side Story
Funny, fierce, honest -- a life richly lived and told.
(With 80 photographs)

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Review:
Best known as the author of scripts for such hit musicals as West Side Story and Gypsy, Arthur Laurents began his career writing strong, socially conscious plays like Home of the Brave and Time of the Cuckoo; he also has impressive credits as a screenwriter (The Way We Were) and stage director (La Cage aux Folles). Such a varied professional life makes for absorbing reading in this lively autobiography stuffed with famous names, including George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, and Stephen Sondheim, all of whom emerge vividly in thumbnail portraits ranging from affectionately frank (Stella Adler) to frankly unflattering (Jerome Robbins). Laurents, born in 1917, was a Marxist during his college years at Cornell, and he retains strong political opinions to this day: he has no use for bigots of any kind, and his memoir displays no inclination to forgive people like Elia Kazan, who named names during the 1950s. Yet the author also has a marvelous sense of humor (after critic Frank Rich inadvertently made public reference to Laurents's homosexuality, Laurents introduced him at a charity lunch as "the man who outed me as a liberal") and a zest for life that shines particularly in a loving portrait of his longtime companion, Tom Hatcher. --Wendy Smith
From the Publisher:
"The distinguished 82-year-old playwright-director-screenwriter turns his clear, cold eye on everybody he has been close to. Famous for being uncompromising as well as brutally honest, he lives up to his reputation... He has drawn a group portrait of some exceptional people who have now vanished. His book ends up being a tribute to them, and, whether it was his intention or not, it is a tribute to Arthur Laurents as well."
-- New York Times Book Review

"A terrific read...a unique document from one of the last of a generation of Broadway greats...Laurents fills his memoir with great dish...But Laurents the man is the enduring star of this story, which makes it a page-turner."
-- San Francisco Chronicle

"Wickedly frank." -- Los Angeles Times

"An authentic, told-from-the-inside document of what it meant to be a writer, an artist, a lover, and a citizen in the America of the latter half of the last century...Laurents has a dangerously good memory ...By virtue of his relentless clarity and unflinching self-effacement, [he] paints a radiant picture of the kind of life nobody gets to live anymore."
-- Vanity Fair

"No one is going to accuse Laurents ... of writing a sentimental, evasive or mindlessly feel-good autobiography. In a jaunty, engrossing style, the 82-year-old discusses the highlights of his 60-year career as a writer, director and producer, the ins and outs of his love life, long-term psychoanalysis and friendships with almost everyone in Hollywood and on Broadway. Laurents is brutally honest about his personal life...and he rarely holds back when he thinks that others deserve criticism.... But for all his candor, Laurents comes across as a highly intelligent, loving, politically involved, generous and gracious man--as evidenced by his commitment to social justice, his artistic vision and his long-term relationships with Farley Granger and with Tom Hatcher, who has been his life partner since 1955."
-- Publishers Weekly

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  • PublisherKnopf
  • Publication date2000
  • ISBN 10 0375400559
  • ISBN 13 9780375400551
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages448
  • Rating

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