Up Till Now: The Autobiography

lit up.
    Of course I knew the risks. A Broadway show can open and close in one night. If you get enough bad reviews you clean out your dressing room the next morning. If that happened I would be paid one-seventh of my weekly salary, so I’d get a hundred dollars for my performance and a hearty handshake. And the mortgage would still be due at the end of the month.
    But I wasn’t worried about that. I was working with Broadway royalty: Merrick, Osborn, and Josh Logan. Logan had directed shows like Mister Roberts and South Pacific and Fanny and Annie Get Your Gun; he’d won a Pulitzer Prize and a year earlier had been nominated for an Oscar for directing Sayonara . Merrick had produced Fanny and The Matchmaker . Paul Osborn had written the Broadway classic Morning’s at Seven as well as the screenplays for East of Eden and South Pacfiic . Their names on the marquee had been enough to generate the first million-plus-dollar advance ticket sale for a drama in Broadway history. A lot of that money had come from a new Broadway phenomenon: suburban theater groups, large groups of people who purchased blocks of tickets before a show opened based on word of mouth. In our case I suspect some of them mistakenly believed they were buying tickets for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new musical, Flower Drum Song, which was opening across the street. But I couldn’t have been more confident. Hello, Broadway, here I come. I was Mr. Broadway, I got the town by the tail.
    I don’t remember precisely when I knew The World of Suzie Wong was a complete disaster. It might have been during rehearsals, when my co-star, France Nuyen, stopped speaking to Josh Logan so he stopped coming to rehearsals. Or it might have been early in our run, when I had that unfortunate fistfight onstage with a member of the cast who swung at me and missed, accidentally coldcocking an eighty-six-year-old prop man. Or it might have been that night earlyin the run when I heard a member of the audience whisper loudly, “Will you still love me after this?”
    Merrick and Logan must have known, they were too smart and experienced not to have known; my guess is that by the time they realized that they were about to launch the Titanic of Broadway shows there was too much advance money in the box office to close it. The problems began with France Nuyen, who only three years earlier had been working in France as a seamstress when she was discovered on a beach by Life photographer Philippe Halsman. Almost immediately after arriving in America Josh Logan cast her in the movie version of South Pacific , which was great because the character she played spoke only pidgin English. Based on her success, he offered her the lead role of a Chinese prostitute in Suzie Wong .
    France Nuyen was absolutely gorgeous, I mean people were just thunderstruck by her beauty. She would have been a great star in still pictures or in a wax museum, but on Broadway actors have to move and talk and express emotion—all of which is very difficult for an actress who doesn’t speak English. She had learned all her lines phonetically. Much of the time she didn’t understand the emotional meaning of the words she was speaking. She knew absolutely nothing about being onstage. As far as I knew, she had never even seen a Broadway show.
    The World of Suzie Wong was a love story set in Hong Kong. I played a Canadian artist who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute and tries to reform her. We opened to universally tepid reviews. If theater groups hadn’t been invented we would have closed the next morning, but we were sold out for three months so Merrick kept the show open. The audience just hated the show. There is an old joke that applied to this show: the audience was moved by our performance—entire rows would literally stand up in the middle of the show and walk out. These people had decided that standing on a Manhattan corner in the winter, waiting for the bus that was to take them back to suburbia, was preferable to watching our show.
    I felt like I was watching my career walk out the door. I was desperate. But just when it seemed like the situation could not possiblyget any worse, the bear stood up on its hind legs! It was monstrous. France Nuyen was the most remarkably naïve young woman—who at the same time was tremendously arrogant. It was a street arrogance, a defense mechanism that expressed itself as anger. I’d never seen anything quite like it. If she was crossed in any way she