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TRICKSTERS AND HUCKSTERS: SHOW BIZ ARCHETYPES
by Addison De Witt
“The Mentor” Part I
“This is shit!” he proclaimed, as he threw my work across the room, humiliating me in front of my fellow grad students. My face turned beet red as my anger and mortification grew. So it took a few minutes for me to absorb the rest of what he was saying, in his famously blunt and inarticulate style: The problem with what I’d written was that, like most of my fellow aspiring musical theatre writers, I was trying too hard, showing off, attempting to pack into one sequence everything I thought I was capable of doing, and the scene had crumbled under its own pretentious weight. And then he repeated the word he’d been trying to drum into our heads like a mantra for weeks: “Simplicity.”
His frustration was understandable. None of us had been taking the advice of this show business legend to heart. In spite of his insistent pleas, the last thing any of us wanted to do was “keep it simple” – we were all trying to emulate the intricate, penetrating, urbane and intellectually sophisticated work of our musical theatre diety, Stephen Sondheim. And who was Buddy Fields? Just an old-fashioned songwriter. In spite of having composed the music for 8 Oscar-nominated songs and a dozen Tony-winning musicals, at close to 80 years old, he was yesterday’s news. And Buddy was maybe the only one who didn’t know it. Or so we pompous twenty-somethings told ourselves. We were the future of the American Musical Theatre, and Buddy Fields (not his real name) was the past.
And yet, what a glorious past it was, in some ways paralleling the musical and cultural history of 20th Century America. Buddy began as a child prodigy, a poor kid who’d made his parents proud by playing classical piano with symphony orchestras. By the age of 12, he was playing barrelhouse piano in speakeasies for the likes of Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice, while gangsters like Al Capone applauded. In his 20’s, he was married and touring with dance bands, by his 30’s he was writing songs in Hollywood, coaching Shirley Temple and Alice Faye. In his 40’s, he zoomed to the top of the Hit Parade, became one of Sinatra’s favorite composers, and wrote some of the tunes that still define the World War II era for many. He was the musical mythmaker of his day.
After the war, at the height of his Hollywood career, Buddy went to New York to try his hand at Broadway, which symbolized, for him, the very top of the heap for a popular composer. His first show flopped, but his second show was a smash, and Buddy never looked back. He almost single-handedly came to define the Broadway sound of the 50’s and 60’s: Big, brassy, emotional, and thrilling. And working with some brilliant collaborators, Buddy’s work seemed to grow in power and prestige, and the list of stars who rode to success singing his work reads like a Who’s Who of the era. His biggest hits were all made into successful films, and revivals of his shows are still filling Broadway theatres in the 21st Century.
Twenty years ago, when Buddy Fields came to teach in that Musical Theatre masters program, it wasn’t easy to reconcile the glorious music that had poured out of Buddy’s soul with the real Buddy in the flesh. Short and dapper, in his snappily tailored jackets and spotless ties, sometimes jabbing the air with an unlit cigar for emphasis, Buddy looked and acted as if he’d stepped right out of a Damon Runyon story. If his English wasn’t quite as comically fractured as the characters in “Guys and Dolls”, his lack of formal schooling and inability to finish a thought or a sentence before enthusiastically tumbling into the next one made him just as colorful. And he had another thing in common with fictional Broadway denizens like Nathan Detroit and Nicely-Nicely Johnson: Buddy had a serious gambling addiction, and had managed to squander away many of the millions he had earned. At its height, Buddy’s gambling had him one fleet-footed step away from debt collectors at every turn; for many years, the U.S. government had a lien on one of his biggest hit musicals, siphoning off Buddy’s royalties before he could spend them.
And yet this amusingly inarticulate, overgrown street kid had the most sophisticated musical and theatrical instincts of anyone in his era. In some ways, Buddy is not unlike the mythical figure of Pan, an artist, a musician, who can be coarse and vulgar and yet has the divinity of imagination in him. As James Hillman says in Pan and The Nightmare (p. 29), “The figure of Pan both represents instinctual compulsion and offers the medium by which the compulsion can be modified through imagination.” While Buddy Fields has none of the monstrous aspects of the Pan figure, he embodies many positive aspects of the archetype, which represents a combination of the instinctual and imaginal.
Buddy was ALL instinct and imagination. His good nature and enthusiasm knew no bounds, and his colleagues have all remarked on the ease with which Buddy would throw out a song if it didn’t work, and his ability to come up with a limitless number of new ideas on the spot, some of them ranging “from the surreal to martian”, by one collaborator’s account, but some of them “pure theatrical gold.”
Oddly enough, in spite of his first reaction to my work, it appeared that Buddy Fields had an instinct about me. At the end of our last session, he pulled me aside and whispered in my ear, “Call my office next week. There’s something I want to talk to you about.” I will never forget the first time I stepped into Buddy Fields’s office. It was like stepping back in time, into another era, into the heydey of the Broadway musical. One entered Buddy’s world through an unmarked door on West 51st Street in Manhattan, a side entrance of the famed Mark Hellinger Theatre, which once was home to “My Fair Lady” and now, sadly, houses the Times Square Church. But in 1981, the Hellinger was still a great musical house, and Buddy’s office was two flights up the dark stairs, a stone’s throw from the dressing rooms where the ghosts of Henry Higgins and Eliza Dolittle still linger.
Buddy’s office itself looked like something out of a 40’s film noir, with decades of grime and a thin layer of dust on the edges. I was instantly enthralled by the original posters of classic musicals that crowded the limited wall space, the photographs of legendary stars with their loving tributes to Buddy scrawled at the bottom, the gold records, the old file cabinets so bursting with decades-old music and correspondence that they stubbornly refused to close. And presiding over the anteroom was perhaps the greatest relic of all: Sylvia Springer, Buddy’s 60-ish chain-smoking, gravel-voiced “manager”, the keeper of the flame, his protector, his alter-ego, mother, wife, sister, disciplinarian and worshiper all rolled into one. When Buddy was threatened if he didn’t pay his gambling debts, it was Sylvia who’d meet shady characters on street corners and beg them for one more week. When Buddy screwed up, it was Sylvia who cleaned up the mess. When Buddy made spur-of-the-moment commitments, Sylvia delivered the bad news. And it was Sylvia who I first encountered that day, eyeing me skeptically, dubious about my prospects.
Sylvia communicated with Buddy primarily by shouting: “Buddy! The kid is here!” And from Buddy’s tiny inner office, just a few steps away: “Who?!” “The kid! The kid from the musical thing!” “Who?!” Wearily, Sylvia nodded toward Buddy’s office: “Just go in.” I entered with trepidation, and Buddy gestured to me to have a seat. His office wasn’t just small, it was triangular in shape, with Buddy squished into the apex behind a large desk piled high with racing forms, copies of Variety, a huge jar of prunes, and a couple of Tony Awards used as paperweights. Behind my seat was an upright piano, and the walls were covered with more posters and photographs of Buddy with some of his legendary friends, many of whom he had survived. The gorgeous cacaphony of Times Square punctuated our conversation.
I couldn’t imagine why Buddy had wanted to meet me. But he came straight to the point. Imagine my surprise when the man who had once called my work “shit” looked me in the eye and said: “You’re the most talented kid in that whole program. I want to write a show with you.”
Join me, Dear Reader, for Part II of “The Mentor,” as yours truly enters the madcap, topsy-turvy world of composer Buddy Fields.
(Continued in Part II...)
Work Cited
Hillman, James. Pan and the Nightmare. Woodstock, CT: Spring, 1972.
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