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TRICKSTERS AND HUCKSTERS: SHOW BIZ ARCHETYPES
by Addison De Witt
"The Monster, Part I”
Tony Jordan was an angry man. At least, he was by the time I met him, in what turned out to be the twilight of his career as a director of theatre, television and film. A once tall and graceful gentleman, he'd been robbed of real elegance by his increasingly stooped shoulders and craggy face – the look of someone who’d been beaten down by years of having to endure the vicissitudes of this Business we call Show. He’d had his triumphs to be sure – starting out as a Broadway chorus boy (dancing behind Carol Channing), becoming a successful choreographer (a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on stage, a Julie Andrews movie on screen), directing Tony-winning (if unmemorable) musicals, and two groundbreaking, Emmy-winning television specials. But his career, like most, had also been marked by a succession of failed musicals and aborted projects that I imagine eventually made him the petty, jealous, bitter and egomaniacal monster who was hired to direct my very first (and one of television’s few remaining) musical variety specials.
I was not only young, but incredibly green, in retrospect, and thrilled to be writing a tribute to one of Broadway’s greatest composers. I would’ve done it for free, if I’d been asked to (and with the paltry sum they paid me, I practically did). The producers were former Broadway stage managers who became big-time producers with one of the most successful new musicals of the decade, and one of them – ”Buzz” (not his real name) – was going to direct. Our early creative meetings remain, many years later, one of the highpoints of my writing career. As we tossed around ideas in his Times Square office, Buzz really listened to me, treated me as a peer, and gave me the room to invent the kind of show I’d always fantasized about. For someone like me, who grew up watching TV in musical/variety’s heydey, it was a dream come true.
Potentially, we had an all-star cast at our disposal, because the composer whose work we were honoring had written for some of the all-time greats of Broadway and Hollywood, many of whom were still alive and kicking. The rest would be seen in a variety of legendary film clips at our disposal. What’s more, our composer had lived a very colorful life, as many of his famous friends and collaborators would be willing to appear on camera to anecdotally confirm.
But by the time I delivered my script, Buzz was suddenly out of the picture, due to an undisclosed illness. (Less than a year later he was dead from AIDS.) With a start date already scheduled, Tony Jordan (not his real name) was brought in to replace him. And that, Dear Reader, is when my dream became a nightmare. As my fictional friend Margo Channing once declared so famously: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night."
While Buzz had the subtle style of leadership which builds trust and loyalty through respect and consensus, Tony Jordan’s style was to rule through tyranny, intimidation, paranoia and fear. As famed depth psychologist James Hillman puts it in his definitive tome Kinds of Power: “The potential for tyranny is always there the moment you exercise your authority (p. 163)...It was said of General, later President, Andrew Jackson that he ‘got the most out of his men because they feared him more than they feared the enemy’” (p. 184).
If the Director of a musical or a film can be likened to a General, and I would be far from the first to make this analogy, then Tony was determined to frighten his troops into submission. Another analogy, no less apt, is of the Director as father figure or head of the family. "Imagine the family life of millions whose power relations are structured by the most fearsome member,” suggests Hillman (187). And what is the cast and crew of a theatrical endeavor if not a makeshift family? As psychologists who specialize in group therapy will tell you, each of us brings the dynamic of our own original family into every new group we enter. The tyrannized child will, even as an adult with a brand new “family”, unconsciously find a new tyrant to be victimized by, thereby replaying the role he or she is most comfortable with. Therapy in groups is, therefore, often used as a tool to allow patients to recognize their role in the “family” and, presumably, to change the dynamic for the future. (Good luck!)
I must reveal, Dear Reader, that as a young man I, too, was perhaps stuck in a role I knew so well from childhood, and was easy prey for a viper like Tony Jordan, who may have recognized my eagerness to please and relished this opportunity to exploit my weakness. If our first meeting was inauspicious, our “collaboration” (and I use the term as loosely as he did) was all downhill from there. Tony entered the room as self-annointed “savior” of our project, replacing our fallen leader (Buzz) at the last minute, and expecting – no insisting upon – our gratitude. Though I was surprised to find out that Tony hadn’t read my script, I was even more astounded by his first command: I was to “tell” him what the special was going to be – not read the script to him – but talk him through it, scene by scene. As I began, Tony laid his head back on the sofa and closed his eyes, explaining that this was his “process,” to “absorb” the script into his consciousness. Reading a script too literally, he insisted, would “inhibit” his creativity.
While I took him through the special, beat by beat, Tony began to move his hands around his head as if to suggest that brilliant ideas were swirling around, percolating, about to burst forth. And then, every few minutes, he would suddenly jump up, as if waking from a fever dream, and announce that he’d just had a brilliant thought. And then he would repeat, sometimes but not always in his own words, what I had just read to him. He would then look at us, quite satisfied with himself, awaiting our astonished exclamations of his genius. At first, I was too appalled to speak and looked to the producers and executives in the room to diplomatically point out to Tony that he'd simply regurgitated everything I just told him. If you are a regular reader of this column, you already know they did not.
No, the others were only too happy to sit there and watch me indulge Tony in his process; though they may not have actually been in thrall to his magical presence, they certainly gave off that impression. One thing about producers: Most will do absolutely anything to keep a troubled project afloat. The humiliation of a writer is, in fact, such a common occurrence, it does not even enter their radar.
About half-way through this outrageous, even comical, display, Tony leapt from his seat and grabbed a telephone to dial his manager. “Sylvia!” he barked into the phone, “I’m in the middle of the meeting and I’m coming up with some of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever had! I can’t just be the 'Director' – my credit has to be 'Conceived and Directed'!...Better yet, separate cards – 'Conceived by Tony Jordan,' right under the title! And then 'Directed by' at the end!...Yes, I know, Darling! I gotta be me, what else can I be?!” I noticed a few furtive glances among the suits, but no one dared confront Tony directly as he returned to his seat following his little performance on the telephone and continued “conceiving” the rest of my script as fast as I could describe it to him.
“Fearsomeness belongs mythically to the world of Ares/Mars, lord of battle rage,” reminds James Hillman (p. 186). As I was to learn as I worked side-by-side with him over a period of several weeks, Tony Jordan’s fearsomeness was born whole cloth out of his own rage. Come back next month to HeadlineMuse.com for Part II of “The Monster” and your patience will be amply rewarded with further tales of Tony’s tyranny, celebrities in panic, and your very own Addison, in the eye of the storm of a “live”, all-star television special, struggling to retain a tiny shred of dignity in a whirlwind of insanity.
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