SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E15
Book world
BY DENNIS DRABELLET
he Jets are due to land in
December, the Sharks
right with them. But
where? In theaters re-
tooled for socially distanced view-
ing (Coronascope?) or in the su-
per-safety of our streamed-into
homes?
We’re talking, of course, about
the Steven Spielberg-Tony Kush-
ner version of what originated in
the 1950s as a Broadway play with
several striking features. There
was the chutzpah of converting
the tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet”
into a musical; the topicality of
replacing the Montagues and
Capulets with finger-snapping,
street-dancing New York juvenile
delinquents; and the stature of
the show’s masterminds — com-
poser Leonard Bernstein, chore-
ographer and director Jerome
Robbins and playwright Arthur
Laurents. (Also contributing was
a young lyricist named Stephen
Sondheim.)
After doing boffo business and
winning multiple Tonys, “West
Side Story” was made into a 1961
movie, which did boffo business
and won multiple Oscars. It’s this
incarnation that film historian
Richard Barrios elucidates in his
informative and engaging new
book, a co-production of Turner
Classic Movies and Running
Press.
Barrios traces “West Side Sto-
ry” back to a 1948 conversation
between Robbins and his then-
boyfriend, Montgomery Clift. Just
as Cole Porter had played fast and
loose with Shakespeare’s “Taming
of the Shrew” in concocting the
Broadway hit “Kiss Me Kate,” so,
Robbins and Clift thought, some-
thing exhilarating might be made
of “Romeo and Juliet.” Robbins
floated the idea of an update
centering on tensions between
Jews and Catholics, but Bernstein
and Laurents had the aha mo-
ment: Both were visiting Los An-
geles in the summer of 1955 when
articles about street-gang warfare
ran in the Los Angeles Times.
Bernstein, Barrios reports,
“was as mercurial as his music;
Laurents was a master at clever,
cutting sarcasm; and Robbins’s
outbursts of temper... promptly
became the stuff of legend.” Thus,
their collaboration could easily
have succumbed to “toxic com-
bustibility.” But the Three Egos
managed to work and play well
together, and what started out as
“East Side Story” and slouched
through its adolescence as “Gang-
way” grew up to be “West Side
Story,” with a pre-Broadway pre-
miere in Washington, D.C., on
August 19, 1957.
The film rights went to the
brothers Mirisch — Walter, Har-
old and Marvin — who had just
become players by producing Bil-
ly Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot.”
Robbins, who had directed the
play, signed on to do the same for
the movie, but because his forte
was choreography, the Mirisch
Company burdened him with a
co-director, Robert Wise.
Casting proved to be a drawn-
out and fraught process. Larry
Kert, the Broadway Tony, “was
apparently never under serious
consideration,” but Elvis Presley
apparently was. (I like to imagine
Elvis singing “You Ain’t Nothin’
But a Shark Fish” at his audition.)
In the end the role went to Rich-
ard Beymer, who had achieved
what Barrios calls “dreamboat”
status in the movie version of
“The Diary of Anne Frank.” Withabout her every year, Cohen
occupies a special place. She read
only Austen for several years
straight. “Some scenes of Emma’s
education,” she reports, “I have
probably read a hundred times.”
She found a role model in Virgin-
ia Woolf, who not only read
Austen but lived through her
intellectually, writing of her in
“letters, diaries, essays, in her
own first novel. Some nights she
immersed herself in Austen, oth-
er times she read her in frag-
ments, ‘two words at a time.’”
Like Olivia Laing’s “The Lone-
ly City” and “The Trip to Echo
Spring” and Leslie Jamison’s
“The Recovering,” “Austen Years”
is a hybrid memoir, combining
literary criticism with personal
history, including synopses of the
novels to help readers who aren’t
familiar with them. Since that
doesn’t quite work here, thequestion is what else is on offer,
besides the most persuasive com-
mercial for Austen ever created?
Cohen writes with emotion
and insight about her father and
his death, and she includes the
unusual backstory of her mar-
riage (Austenian, it turns out)
and vignettes of motherhood and
family life. To my taste, there was
a bit too much of the father and a
bit too little of everything else.
For example, I lingered over this
passage, wanting to know more
about the complicated girl who
committed the sin described, the
same one who read through all
the Austen novels straight and
could barely remember them af-
terward:
“I was a lonely, reading child,
and usually had one friend each
year, a friend whose parents were
visiting at the university from
somewhere else, a place to whichshe would return at the end of
that year, and perhaps send me a
letter or two that I would never
reply to, but would keep, guiltily,
in a kind of pincers of knowing I
ought to write and not writing, in
the drawers of my rolltop desk.”
That is such an interesting
confession. I can almost see a
whole novel in it.
But Emma and Elinor and
Elizabeth and Marianne, and of
course Jane, are the central char-
acters of this book. Rachel is
supporting cast. I plan to go back
to her “Austen Years” after I’ve
put in mine.
[email protected]Marion Winik, a professor at the
University of Baltimore, is the author
of numerous books, including “First
Comes Love,” “The Lunch-Box
Chronicles” and, most recently, “The
Big Book of the Dead.”BY MARION WINIKS
hould you read Rachel Co-
hen’s thoughtful “memoir in
five novels,” “Austen Years,”
if you are not up on your Austen?
Having just done so, I wish I had
not, and, thus, hereby advise you
to read at least four if not all six
of Jane Austen’s novels before
you attempt Cohen’s extended
meditation on them, and do not
try to get away with watching the
movie versions.
If you disobey me, the main
thing you will take away from
Cohen’s book is that you must
read all of Jane Austen as soon as
possible. I have read only “Prideand Prejudice” and “Sense and
Sensibility,” and it was a long
time ago, and like Cohen in her
jejune early reading of the nov-
els, I didn’t properly appreciate
them. I cannot say, as does
Ta-Nehisi Coates, quoted here,
that “My ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is
truly mine.” Cohen goes on to
explain, “After I had learned
more of what Austen had meant
and meant to others, I saw more
of who I had been, reading her
pages.”
Okay, I’m convinced. I want
that!
Among the myriad passionate
readers of Austen, who seem to
produce dozens of new booksJane Austen and her creations
dominate this literary memoir
AUSTEN YEARS
A Memoir in
Five Novels
By Rachel
Cohen
Farrar, Strauss
and Giroux.
288 pp. $28There was a place for ‘West Side Story’ on the big screen in 1961
Film historian Richard Barrios tells how a hit play by musical-theater masterminds became a hit movie. Will the Spielberg-Kushner version be so lucky?
Carol Lawrence, the Maria of the
original cast, deemed now too old
for the role, Natalie Wood was
chosen for her star power.
For all his dreamboating, the
Iowa-born Beymer has admitted
that he wasn’t right for Tony.
Wood worked hard on her danc-
ing, even harder on her singing.
She was led to believe that her
voice would be used for all but the
highest notes, which Marni Nixon
would dub. In fact, management
knew all along that Maria’s vocals
would be all-Nixon, all the time.
Wood had to live with what Barri-
os calls “a sour conclusion to a
difficult professional experience.”
Those were the days when Hol-
lywood enticed folks into movie
theaters with spectacles that beg-
gared the small screen of a black-
and-white TV. Spectacle doesn’t
come cheap, and the film was
budgeted at a robust $5 million.
Largely due to Robbins’s perfec-
tionism, the production got off to
a squandering start. He insisted
on take after take for the dance
numbers, and instead of the nor-
mal shooting pace of “two to four
script pages per day, totaling
roughly three minutes,” the
Mirisches were getting “less than
one page and well under one
minute per day.” In a section of the
book wryly called “The Rumble,”
Barrios recounts the firing of Rob-
bins and the ascension of Wise,
who holds the dubious distinc-
tion of having second-guessed
two artistic titans, Robbins and
Orson Welles. (When in 1942 “The
Magnificent Ambersons,” Welles’sfollow-up to “Citizen Kane,” came
in too long and gloomy for the
studio’s taste, Wise cut it and
filmed a new, upbeat ending.)
At any rate, the Wised-up “West
Side Story” was a hit, grossing
$44 million; winning 10 Oscars
plus a special honorary award for
Robbins; and pleasing the critics.Most of them, anyway. Two of the
greats, Pauline Kael and David
Thomson, later filed dissents, she
dismissing the film as “frenzied
hokum,” he as “pedestrian.”
So there’s room for improve-
ment by Messrs. Spielberg and
Kushner. As we wait for their
“West Side Story” to arrive via onetechnology or another, reading
Barrios will make us better
equipped to reach our own ver-
dict.
[email protected]Dennis Drabelle, a former
contributing editor of Book World,
writes frequently about movies.TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES, INC.MANOAH BOWMANWEST SIDE
STORY
The Jets, the
Sharks, and
the Making of a
Classic
By Richard
Barrios
TCM/Running
Press. 221 pp.
$28ABOVE:
Maria Jimenez
Henley, left,
Rita Moreno,
Yvonne Othon
and Suzie
Kaye sing and
dance in the
1961 movie
version of
“West Side
Story.”
LEFT: Boris
Leven, the
movie’s
production
designer, with
a model for
Maria’s fire
escape.The Movie Directory has gone dark.We will raise the curtain again
as soon as events warrant.