36 Saturday December 4 2021 | the times
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probably didn’t mind being denounced by
McCarthyites. In fact, he possibly regarded it, and the
800-page dossier that the FBI had started compiling
about his leftish activities, as badges of honour. They
certainly didn’t harm his career. He probably wasn’t
unduly fussed about working with Robbins, though he
did refer to him as “Black Jerome” through all the time
they were creating West Side Story.
With Laurents it was much more difficult.
When I asked him why he had agreed to work
with Robbins he replied: “What do you do?
Cut off your nose to spite your face? The man
was absolutely brilliant. The fact that he was
also a monster was irrelevant, or so it seemed.
We stopped being friends. That was the line I
drew.”
The line was drawn with scarring
sharpness though. When West Side Story was
on an out-of-town tryout, Laurents’s anger
burst like a dam. “I told Robbins he was
immoral and indecent,” Laurents said.
“Frankly, though, I don’t think he cared.”
The bad feeling caused by all that
persisted through the making of West Side
Story but something else drove an even
bigger wedge between Robbins and the rest.
Back in 1947, when Robbins had originally
approached Bernstein and Laurents about
doing a modern-day musical version of
Romeo and Juliet, the concept was very
different. The conflict would be between
working-class Irish Catholics and Jews
living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Indeed, Laurents’s first draft was called East Side Story.
However, the three men quickly realised that the
Catholics/Jews friction had already been covered in
Broadway plays, and anyway was a bit passé in postwar
New York.
The project was dropped for five years, until
Bernstein happened to meet Laurents in Hollywood
and they began talking about the Latino gangs of Los
Angeles then making headlines. The warfare between
them, the pair agreed, would make a much better
subject for a musical (and allow Bernstein to write the
Latin-infused rhythms he craved), though LaurentsA
ge has its compensations. As Steven
SpieIberg’s new film of West Side Story
opens, acquainting a new generation with
this most revolutionary of musicals, I realise
I must be one of the few journalists still alive
to have interviewed all four of the geniuses who
created this 1957 classic. (Well, in fairness there was a
fifth — the man who wrote Romeo and Juliet, from
whom they pinched the plot, but he died a little before
my time.) As an arts journalist you get used to meeting
people who have giant talents, giant ambitions and
giant if not downright terrifying personalities, but the
dazzling quartet behind West Side Story were
exceptional even by those standards.
The composer was Leonard Bernstein, who went on
to dominate the world of classical music as a composer
and conductor just as emphatically as he had
conquered Broadway in his thirties. The librettist, who
would later claim it was his idea to turn Shakespeare’s
tragedy of warring Renaissance families into a bitingly
contemporary portrayal of New York gang warfare, was
a hardbitten left-wing playwright and screenwriter
called Arthur Laurents.
The lyricist, the man responsible for the audaciously
rhymed words of West Side Story’s songs, was Stephen
Sondheim, who died last week. Then still in his mid-
twenties, he was very much the junior partner, with
shows such as Sweeney Todd, Company and A Little
Night Music lying decades into the future.
And driving the whole enterprise, appropriately, was
the most driven genius on Broadway: the dictatorial
though deeply insecure director and choreographer
Jerome Robbins. Out of the four, he was the one who
came across as the most haughty, touchy and guarded
when I interviewed him (although, in fairness, he never
liked talking to the press, let alone a novice British
hack asking him what he thought of Andrew Lloyd
Webber).
They were all Jewish, all products of first or second
generation immigrant families, and all gay men at a
time in American life when it wasn’t advisable to
present yourself as anything other than a full-time
heterosexual, even in arty circles. (Laurents told me he
had managed to write the screenplay of Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1948 thriller Rope in such a way that its
star actor, James Stewart, never realised his character
was homosexual.) They should have got on like a
proverbial house on fire. And the end result of their
collaboration — a musical in which music and words,
plot and characterisation, tragedy and entertainment,
are so perfectly balanced — suggests they did.
The reality was anything but that. Two of them came
into the project with a deep loathing for the third. They
all ended it vowing never to collaborate again —
although, this being showbiz and West Side Story
The bitterest
rivalries often
produce the
sweetest music
having made them all very rich and famous, they did.
As Bernstein told friends on the night the show
opened: “I will never, never work with Jerome Robbins
again as long as I live — at least for a while.”
What caused all this suspicion and surliness? Part
of it can be traced to events years earlier. In the late
1940s the US Congress’s House Un-American Activities
Committee, which by that time was firmly focused on
weeding out communists (or alleged communists) from
American public life, turned its attentions to
Hollywood and Broadway, where there were a great
many left-wing sympathisers to be interrogated. After
that they could be drummed out of work (as hundreds
were) and even have their passports withdrawn.
It was a dreadful episode in American life, led by
ferocious anti-communist campaigners such as Senator
Joseph McCarthy. The playwright Arthur Miller,
Marilyn Monroe’s lover and later husband, brilliantly
captured the mood of mass hysteria against
imagined internal enemies in his 1953
masterpiece The Crucible, ostensibly about
the Salem witch trials in 17th-century
Massachusetts but clearly a scathing
allegory of McCarthyism. Miller himself had
his passport withdrawn when he wanted to
attend the London premiere of the play.
A favourite way of pressurising those
accused of un-American activities was to
promise them no further action if they
denounced other communists. The tactic
caused a bitter chasm in showbiz circles that
lasted for decades — a chasm between those
doing the denouncing to save their own skins
and those who were denounced.
That chasm cut right through the creative
team of West Side Story. Back in 1950 Robbins
had been called to testify by the committee
because he had once been a Communist Party
member. He was asked to denounce others
and refused for three years. Then he cracked.
Later he told relatives he had been threatened
with exposure of his homosexuality. Either
way, he named ten people as communists —
actors, a film-maker, a playwright and even a
dance critic — and they were all blacklisted.
By 1955, when the team came together to create West
Side Story, Robbins was already a hated figure by many
on Broadway. It was worse than that, however. Among
those denounced were Laurents and Bernstein. Both
had their passports temporarily revoked. In addition,
Bernstein, the quintessential American composer, had
his music banned from overseas State Department
functions.
So why did they agree to work with Robbins at all?
Maybe for different psychological reasons. BernsteinW
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IndeedLaureweekend essay
From West Side Story to the Beatles and Oasis, rancour and
mutual contempt seem to be not merely side-effects of big
personalities working together, but essential requirements
for creating the most memorable art, says Richard Morrisonn
One of the longest feuds
in music, between Stevie
Nicks and Lindsey
Buckingham, erupted
again when Nicks was
accused of wanting to
shape Fleetwood Mac in
her image, “like Trump
and the Republicans”