Giving lines to voice

Arthur Laurents, who wrote the great stage and film hit West Side Story, has just died. Laurence Arnold on the irascible writer.

Arthur Laurents, the storyteller who scripted West Side Story and Gypsy, two of the most influential musicals in theatre history, died on May 5. He was 93.

Laurents worked with giants like Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim. He wrote the novel and screenplay for The Way We Were (1973) and the screenplays for Anastasia (1956) and The Turning Point (1977). His other musicals included Anyone Can Whistle and Do I Hear a Waltz? His plays included The Time of the Cuckoo, which became Summertime, a movie starring Katharine Hepburn.

 

He was known for a volatile personality and outspokenness that cost him friendships.

West Side Story reimagined the feuding clans of Romeo and Juliet as two gangs on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the Caucasian Jets. The show, which debuted in 1957, was innovative for its focus on music and dance. Laurents wrote that the show proved that “any subject — murder, attempted rape, bigotry — could be the subject of a popular musical”. After 732 performances on Broadway, it was turned into a film in 1961.

In 2006 Laurents revised it. In the revival the Sharks spoke and sang in Spanish.

Laurents was born on July 14, 1917, in New York. His father was a lawyer. His mother was a teacher and homemaker. Growing up in Brooklyn, he attended small plays, then Broadway plays and Manhattan opera. He began writing for radio, selling his first play, Now Playing Tomorrow, to CBS.

“From being limited to one of the six senses — hearing — I learned how to establish character through words and how to propel action through dialogue,” he later wrote. Laurents spent World War II writing scripts for the Office of War Information. In 1944, he wrote his first play, Home of the Brave, about a Jewish soldier traumatised by his wartime experience in the South Pacific. It was turned into a film in 1949.

Laurents moved to Hollywood, working on The Snake Pit and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. He went to Europe during the McCarthy era, learning later that he had been blacklisted. Back in the US he had his first Broadway hit with The Time of the Cuckoo (1952-1953).

The idea for West Side Story began with Robbins. In 1949 he asked Laurents to draft a script, and Bernstein the music, for a story of conflict between Jews and Italian Catholics on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

After West Side Story’s success, Laurents said he turned down three requests to write the book for Gypsy, based on Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1957 memoir. He came around when he realised the musical didn’t have to be about a striptease queen but about her mother — “a larger-than-life mother, a mythic mesmerising mother, a monster of a mother sweetly named Rose”.

In his directing debut, I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962), he cast a 19-year-old Barbra Streisand, launching her career.

The Way We Were, Laurents’s first original movie script, was based on his time in McCarthy-era Hollywood. Streisand and Robert Redford played a couple whose marriage is undermined by their differences. Streisand’s role was as a Jewish communist. The director, Sydney Pollack, insisted on equal footing for Redford, and he and Laurents clashed throughout the filming.

Laurents also drew upon his homosexuality. He included a relationship between two men, a dancer and his company’s ballet master, in The Turning Point, only to see it all but deleted by the director, Herbert Ross. The movie was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Laurents for best screenplay, winning none.