La planificación de recursos humanos en la Administración Pública… 32

“hoo-hoo,” calls angela lansbury, her head poking out of her apartment’s door to greet me as I step off the elevator. Already I am feeling like I need to be pinched. I have been “hoo-hooed” by Angela Lansbury.

I actually walked in to our fi rst meeting feeling a bit stunned to be there. Lansbury was, after all, an eighty-four-year-old woman performing eight times a week in Blithe Spirit . More-over, it was spring, which meant that we were in the heat of Broadway’s busiest season. She was attending galas, luncheons, and award ceremonies almost daily and dealing with the onslaught of press that comes with the Tony nomination she had received (an award she’d go on to win weeks later). I wouldn’t have expected her to make time for me and I was both ap-preciative and a little amazed that she did.

Stepping into her home, I was struck by the simplicity Lansbury had chosen for herself. Hers is a lovely but unfussy apartment, not especially spacious or showy. A small terrace allows her to indulge her love of gardening with a few fl owering plants. With the exception of one 8 × 10 photo-graph of Lansbury as Sweeney Todd ’s amoral slattern, Mrs. Lovett, unceremoniously tucked into a corner in the dining room, there was not a single visible trace of a life in show business. None of her four Tony Awards or six Golden Globes were on display; no other pictures of her in some of her great roles; no hint of her Kennedy Center Honor; no posters from her fi lms or television work which netted her three Oscar nominations and eighteen Emmy nods; no souvenirs from her thirteen-year stint as J. B. Fletcher on Murder She Wrote . Hers was the Manhattan apartment of a busy working woman with books and newspapers by the couch and an open laptop off to the side.

The past, it seemed, was the past, and Lansbury has no need to surround herself with its remnants.

Angela Lansbury was born in London in 1925 and, like most of the women in this book, trained as an actor from an early age. Unlike all of the others women in this book, however, she had no dreams of the musical theater and didn’t especially aspire to it. Her career began in fi lm, and she appeared in more than forty movies before she made it to Broadway in 1957 ( Hotel Paradiso , opposite Bert Lahr, an experience she loved). But it wasn’t until 1964 that Lansbury had the opportunity to do a musical. That show, Anyone Can Whistle , was one of Broadway’s most legendary fl ops, lasting only nine performances. But it gave Lansbury her fi rst taste of her own strength as a musical performer and it introduced her to Stephen Sond-heim with whom she would do three more shows.

Only two years later came Lansbury’s triumphant, Tony Award–winning turn as the title character in Jerry Herman’s Mame . After more than two decades as a supporting player, Lans-bury, at forty, was fi nally a star. Her subsequent shows included another Jerry Herman vehicle,

Dear World , the ill-fated Prettybelle , Broadway’s fi rst revival of Gypsy , and a three-week stint in The King and I to give that production some star power during Yul Brynner’s vacation. Then in 1979, came Sweeney Todd , in which Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett served up human meat pies to a Stephen Sondheim score. The New York Times said of her performance, which would earn Lansbury her fourth Tony, “Her songs . . . are awesomely diffi cult and she does them awesomely well.”

Backstage at Mame , showing a side we seldom associate with Lansbury. (Photofest)

angela lansbury 75 Lansbury’s subsequent shows, a play

called A Little Family Business and a revival of Mame , were both disappointments that led her back to Hollywood where, in 1984, she began her amazing run in Murder She Wrote . Despite the ongoing feeling that the show my family. Everyone in my family worked on the show.” It took twenty-three years for Lansbury to make it back to Broadway.

When she did, in the 2007 Terrence McNally play, Deuce , she claimed it would be

her fi nal stage outing. It wasn’t. Blithe Spirit came in 2009 and then, later that same year, a re-vival of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music . 2012 brought a rere-vival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man and in 2013, an Australian tour of Driving Miss Daisy .

We sit down on her white, overstuff ed couch, but not before Lansbury insists on popping into the kitchen to bring me a beverage I insist I don’t need. But she is gracious to a fault. She is, in fact, the only woman in this book who called me after the interview to thank me. It’s that kind of gesture that makes Lansbury one of the few celebrities who manage to actually be the person that millions of people hope she is.

You are nominated for a Tony this year. Is the experience of being a nominee very dif-ferent from when you were nominated for Mame and Dear World ?

Oh yes. The business has changed totally. Totally diff erent. Broadway is not the Broadway of the ’60s and ’70s. Why should it be? My goodness, I am aware of the diff erences. It all has to do with the fact that, because of the Internet, everything is immediately available. Before, you had to read the papers, the columns, to know what was going on. Now everything is right out there. YouTube. You name it, it’s there. Not only is what you’re doing now there, but every-thing you’ve done in the past comes bubbling up out of the drain.

How do you feel about that?

It’s okay on the one hand. On the other hand it’s a little daunting, I think. What we did then doesn’t belong in today’s world. It’s old-fashioned and rather studied and strange, you know?

But at the same time it’s given people the opportunity to see things like your performance of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” on the 1968 Oscars, things we thought were lost for all time .

I guess so. People have come up to me and said, “Wow! You were doing splits!” In those days I learned how to do those things. All of that was part of being a leading musical comedy actress in the 1960s. And that’s what I managed to do, thank God.

You didn’t start your musical career until much later in your life. You were already thirty- eight and had three Oscar nominations under your belt. As legend has it, out of the blue, you got a letter from Arthur Laurents [writer and director], asking if you’d be interested in doing a musical . Sweeney Todd , Broadway and National

Tour, 1979 (Tony Award) Mame , Broadway, 1983

A Little Night Music , Broadway, 2010

Well, that was it. That was the beginning. Arthur wrote me this letter. I can see it in my mind’s eye as clear as anything. It was a lovely dark blue color, very chic and very unusual in those days. I knew who he was. I knew he had written the books to West Side Story and Gypsy , but I didn’t know him personally. He took it upon himself to write me a personal note. So I auditioned for him and Stephen Sondheim and I managed to persuade them that I could do it [ Anyone Can Whistle ].

One of the things you said about it at the time was, “I thought it was nuts, crackers. But there was something about it that appealed to me.” What was it about the role of Cora Hooper that spoke to you?

Cora Hoover Hooper was such an outrageous character and you have to understand that, really and truly from the get-go, I have been interested in character; what that person is like underneath those layers. This [role] said to me, “there’s some gold that could be mined here.”

I heard the score and I realized that this was going to challenge me as a singer and a performer.

And the scenes for Cora as the Mayoress were really very funny. Tough and caustic. Although I don’t think I was as tough or nasty as Arthur would have liked me to be. I know that for a fact.

He used to say, “Angie, here’s a woman who’s ready to say, ‘set the dogs on them!’” That’s what he really wanted and I had problems with that. We were too close to the civil rights movement and I didn’t want to go there, as the expression goes. And I didn’t. But it didn’t matter. She was still funny and dreadful and outrageous.

Anyone Can Whistle was legendary in the musical theater world. It was reputedly a hellish out-of-town tryout. You said at one point that it was the only time you ever screamed at Ste-phen Sondheim .

I did! Not only did I scream at him, I was at the top of the stairs screaming down two stories. I screamed, “I don’t know what you want! What do you want me to do?”

But through all of that, it was still your fi rst musical. Do you remember experiencing joy in that?

Oh yes. Doing “Me and My Town” was a blast. It really was. It was fantastic. I had been a great admirer of Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers and that was what we were doing.

She had coached me at MGM in the old days. To have an opportunity to do something like that was incredible, a dream come true.

The show only lasted on Broadway for nine performances . . .

Only nine performances and about three million people saw those nine performances.

I’ve never met anyone of a certain age who hasn’t [claimed to have] seen that performance. You weren’t born, but those who were in New York not only saw it, they saw every single perfor-mance. That was the kind of wonderful old wives’ tale built up around the show.

I saw the concert version at Carnegie Hall in 1995 and a big part of the excitement that night was that you were narrating. How was it for you watching that?

It was kind of sweet/sad in a way. I think I thought, “God, I could still have done that .” I’m always challenged by things. I don’t know what it is. I always think I could have done it. But Madeline Kahn who played it, she was great.

Watching the show so many years later, did it seem diff erent to you as a piece?

Yes. It seemed a little bit childish and old-fashioned, you know. There were a couple of great, great songs in it. “With So Little to Be Sure Of” and “Anyone Can Whistle.” Those were glorious songs.

angela lansbury 77 That show was your fi rst experience of Stephen Sondheim who was himself very young.

Do you have specifi c memories of him at that time?

Even at that early age, I was very awed by him. I always thought, and I do to this day, that he’s been a teacher of how to sing songs. Not necessarily how to get the content across but certainly how to sing them.

Do you mean technically?

No. Well, yes, to a certain extent I do. I think to sing his music you have to have a certain technique. It’s all about lyrics, it’s all about enunciation, it’s all about being understood.

Doesn’t that really come from the head and heart?

Well, it doesn’t, no. Not necessarily. You can be thinking that you are putting it across but the audience is not getting it because of the way you are singing it. The word does not reach them. With him, that’s of prime importance.

It’s interesting that he was so adept at teaching even that early in his career . He was always an old soul in a curious way.

What about Arthur Laurents?

To be perfectly honest, and Arthur, I think, understands this and would agree with me, we didn’t get along. I found him diffi cult as a director. I had never run into anybody like him before. He was also fi ghting with his own book and trying to make it all work. Of course I think an author believes in his work but you’ve got to still make it play. We were on the road and trying to make things work better. The audience wasn’t liking what they were seeing. They were almost throwing tomatoes at the stage. They were very verbal and noisy, screaming and shouting. That’s tough to swallow for the author.

I had read that and it’s hard for me to imagine. No one actually screams at the stage any more .

Yes, that’s interesting. People were outraged. People got really upset at Sweeney Todd , too, but that’s diff erent I guess. They didn’t like the blood. And now you can show them buckets of blood and they don’t mind, as we saw [with the 2005 revival that literally incorporated buckets of blood].

I am interested in your having seen several of your other roles played by other women. Is watching someone else tread in your shoes hard for you? Or is it fun? What’s that like?

You just watch. I watched Ann Miller play Mame. She was the only one I saw do it. I thought, “Well, it’s a whole diff erent show.” She pulled out a few stops and she did it her way and it worked. That show works no matter who’s playing it. Audiences love it.

Did you see the fi lm version of Sweeney Todd ?

Yes I did. That was interesting to me. Johnny Depp is a fascinating performer. I enjoyed watching him. I understood what he was doing and I was impressed with his ability to sing it.

He did quite well. He really did. He didn’t sing it like a big baritone, no, but he certainly gave it a quality that was quite interesting, I must say. Helena Bonham Carter, I happen to know, was thwarted in her desire to be funny because her husband [director Tim Burton] wouldn’t allow her to be. She wanted to bring that sense of musical comedy. But she’s so interesting to watch. I am always interested in people’s faces and certainly her look is very stunning and interesting. It wasn’t Mrs. Lovett but whoever she was . . .

After Anyone Can Whistle , you went back to LA but it wasn’t too long before Mame came into the picture. It was announced that Mary Martin wasn’t going to do the show as had been planned and you went after it with great gusto .

I met with [book writers] Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee in Malibu for brunch one day and Jerry [Herman] was there. We talked about the possibility and at that time I knew that Jerry was really on my team although there were other ladies who were being considered by the producers who, of course, were looking for a money name. I, at that point, certainly was not. I came in to New York to audition. I auditioned once, I auditioned twice, I auditioned three times, and I fi nally got it.

For him to know you could sing it, apparently Jerry Herman was one of the three million who saw Anyone Can Whistle .

Oh yeah. Talk to him, he’ll tell you.

But you hadn’t seen Rosalind Russell’s performance so you didn’t know the part except by reputation, yet you knew it was for you?

Well I read the book Auntie Mame . That was very helpful to me. But I didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of Russell and I didn’t want to play it with cigarette holders and all of that stuff . I wanted to go a diff erent route. I knew the movie had been made and the stage version done very successfully. This was the musical. And I knew it was going to be an opportunity to wear some fabulous clothes. I knew that this would be a huge challenge but I had Jerry Herman on my side. He was extraordinary in his willingness to help me in every possible way.

You made four cross-country trips to audition and Jerry taught you the songs in advance and played for you at the audition. Ultimately it was yours but I am curious about your utter confi dence that you could tackle the lead in a splashy musical, and in Jerry Herman’s confi -dence in you. After all, the vocal demands were so diff erent from anything in Anyone Can Whistle .

I did work over the year to do everything I could do to build my voice for Mame . There were several people who helped me learn how to sing the right way. I never knew how to do exercises and I don’t to this day. I just stand up and sing. I don’t know how to sing except in the role. I am not a stand-up singer. I can’t do it. But when it came to Mame and the songs that I got to sing, they were natural for me. They sat perfectly within my range. They were just super to sing.

As you were rehearsing that show, did it feel very diff erent from your previous musical theater experience—knowing that this time it was working? And also knowing that it was all resting on your shoulders?

That was the thing. I had a director, Gene Saks, who was extraordinary. I was working with the great Bea Arthur [Lansbury tears up]. We both launched into that show together. We weren’t really ready. I was a bit overweight—not too bad. We really went to town with [chore-ographer] Onna White to get ourselves in shape. The combination of Gene and Bea and Onna and me and everybody in that company, it was like it was blessed from the start. When we fi -nally did get to Philadelphia, it was extraordinary, really, because it was quite evident that we had a huge hit on our hands. The only problem was that I didn’t really know how to take the stage. I had the producers, Jimmy Carr and Bobby Fryer, come to me and say, “Angie, you can do this. You’ve got to believe that you alone are quite enough on that stage. You just take it, it’s yours.” I had to learn within those few days on the road that it was okay to do that. It’s a funny

angela lansbury 79 thing to discover that you can stand there and demand the attention of the audience and give them everything you’ve got and share with them the great moments that are there in the role.

It took me awhile to really do that but that was the time when I did it. I didn’t know how to do that in Anyone Can Whistle .

Mame had twenty-eight costumes which you had to change in and out of in a fl ash, and then you had to walk onstage as if you had been wearing them for hours .

That’s right. It was a hairy experience because at that time I had rather long hair and to get

That’s right. It was a hairy experience because at that time I had rather long hair and to get