100 New Yorkers of the 1970s Part 16

Between acting a.s.signments, says Keith with affection, he spends most of his time "raising the d.a.m.n kids. It's a 24-hour job. We do a lot of outdoor stuff, because in Hawaii you can, all year round. We go on the beach and camp out and all that c.r.a.p."

He finds that being based in Hawaii causes no problems with his career.

"It doesn't make any difference where you live," Keith growls softly.

"People live in London, in Spain, in Switzerland. You don't go around looking for jobs. You wait till your agent calls you and you get on a plane and go. You can be halfway around the world overnight, from anywhere.

It beats Bayonne."

WESTSIDER HAROLD KENNEDY Author of _No Pickle, No Performance_

7-22-78

In the early days of Harold Kennedy's theatrical career, he was involved in a play written by Sinclair Lewis, who may have been a great novelist but was no playwright. Kennedy was talking with Lewis one evening before the play opened when a young student approached the famous author and politely asked for an autograph. Lewis took the piece of paper the boy offered him and wrote on it: "Why don't you find a hobby that isn't a nuisance to other people?" He handed it back unsigned.

But the boy got even. The play opened a few nights later and was a total disaster. Lewis was sitting gloomily in the dressing room after the final curtain when a note was hand-delivered to him by an usher. He opened it and read, in his own handwriting: "Why don't you find a hobby that isn't a nuisance to other people?"

The story is one of dozens told in Harold Kennedy's book, _No Pickle, No Performance_, published this month by Doubleday. The book is a fascinating collection of true-life anecdotes stored up by Kennedy during his four decades in the theatre as a director, actor, and playwright on Broadway and across the country. The subt.i.tle of his book is "An Irreverent Theatrical Excursion from Tallulah to Travolta," and he has written chapters about his experiences with both of these stars, in addition to Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, Thornton Wilder, Gloria Swanson, Steve Allen, and others who are less well known today but were legends in their time.

Its book is dedicated to actress Renee Taylor, who refused to come on stage during a play's opening night until she got a pickle with her sandwich, as she had during the previews. The coffee shop that had provided those sandwiches was closed, and the curtain was held while a prop man got in his car and went searching for the holy pickle. It arrived seven minutes after the advertised curtain time, and the show went on.

Unknown to Taylor, the stage crew was so enraged by her antics that they performed "a little ceremony" with the pickle before giving it to her.

Gloria Swanson later said: "Poor Miss Taylor. Can't you see her shopping around to every delicatessen in New York complaining that she can never find a pickle to match the caliber of the one she had in New Jersey."

I meet the author on a recent evening at Backstage on West 45th Street.

"The thing about this book," he says, "is that whether people know the actors or not, they find the stories amusing. You know, I never thought of writing these stories down. I used to tell them to other members of the company over drinks after the show, and everyone loved them. But I'm an actor, and I thought what made them funny was the way I told them.

I didn't know how they'd look in print. A good friend of mine finally convinced me to write about a hundred pages, and I said, "If anyone wants it, I'll write the whole thing." The first publisher I sent it to -- Doubleday -- accepted it."

Those who have seen portions of the Ginger Rogers chapter in a recent issue of _New York_ magazine might think the book is malicious, but this is not the case. Says Kennedy: "It just tells what happened, and some people come out better than others."

The chapter begins: "It seems that Ginger Rogers never smiles. It may be that someone has told her it would crack her face. It may be more likely that she's a lady devoid of one smidgin of one inch of a sense of humor."

The author describes her as "colder than anyone else I had met. Totally unlike her screen self -- which only goes to prove what a good actress she is."

He reveals Rogers at her worst when she attempts to make an actor out of her no-talent fifth husband, G. William Marshall, at the expense of Kennedy and everyone else in the cast. The couple were still on their honeymoon, and Rogers demanded that Bill be given the role of her leading man in _Bell, Book and Candle_. The results were disastrous.

Detroit's leading critic wrote after the opening: "The program lists Mr.

Marshall as having been acquainted with many phases of show business.

Last night he showed not even a nodding acquaintance with any of them."

Kennedy writes at the chapter's end: "Hopefully Ginger will find another husband. As it turned out, the last one apparently worked out worse for her than it did for me." Rogers is apparently considering a lawsuit against the author.

Still very active in the theatre at 64, Kennedy is undertaking three productions this summer -- _Barefoot In the Park_ with Maureen O'Sullivan and Donny Most, _The Marriage-Go-Round_ with Kitty Carlisle, and _Bell, Book and Candle_ with Lana Turner. He is directing all three and acting in two of them.

Two years ago he directed John Travolta for a summer stock company that opened to hordes of screaming teenagers in Skowhegan, Maine.

Whenever Travolta made in entrance or an exit, Kennedy tells in the chapter t.i.tled "John Who?", he caused such a commotion that the play virtually came to a halt. "John is a darling. He's such a lovely boy," says the author. "He'd kiss me full on the lips when we met and parted. And I say that with no sense of implication. In the theatre, we've always been relaxed about an expression of affection. ... I thought in _Sat.u.r.day Night Fever_ he was a star in the old tradition -- in the tradition of Tyrone Power. ... I couldn't call John intelligent, but he'll own the movie industry in two years. And he has things in his contract that no other stars have had, like approval of the final cut of the movie."

A native of Holyoke, Ma.s.sachusetts, Kennedy worked his way through Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama "and came out with a profit." In 1937 he moved to New York; he has lived on the West Side ever since. Among his close friends are some of the merchants and artisans in his area. "They care about theatre and they know we have special problems," he says. "There's Mal the Tailor on West 72nd Street, for example. If I'm doing a play and need something right away, he'll drop everything and take care of me."

_No Pickle, No Performance_ has already received many favorable reviews and has been partially reprinted in the _New York Post_.

Kennedy is planning to hit the talk shows soon with some of his leading ladies. What seems to be uppermost in his mind at the moment, however, is whether Ginger Rogers will sue for libel.

"I kind of wish she would, just to get some publicity for the book," he muses. "Of course, she's a fool if she does, because she'd never win, and the people who haven't heard of the book will rush out and get it. ... But I can say one thing: if there's a package from Ginger waiting for me in my dressing room, I'm going to have it dumped in water."

WESTSIDER ANNA KISSELGOFF Dance critic for the _New York Times_

6-9-79

It was 3 p.m., and as usual, Anna Kisselgoff was sitting before the computer-typewriter at the _New York Times'_ newsroom, putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches on her latest dance review. She had spent the morning doing research, and had arrived at the _Times_ building around noon to begin writing the article directly on the computer terminal, using her notes taken the night before at a dance performance. At 8 o'clock that evening, she would be attending yet another performance, but for the moment at least, Miss Kisselgoff had a little time to herself, and when we sat down to talk in her three-walled cubicle office facing the relatively quiet newsroom, she seemed noticeably relaxed and cheerful, notwithstanding the pile of opened and unopened mail piled high on her desk.

"We get no help: that's the problem," she said, in a clear, even voice with a tone that recalled Mary Tyler Moore. "We have one secretary for nine people in the arts and architecture department. She's terribly overworked," Anne went on, sweeping her hands like an orchestra conductor toward the stack of mail. "You're looking at what's left after I've thrown away half of it. I make up the review schedule for the week based on these releases."

Pet.i.te, attractive, and looking somewhat younger than her 41 years, the effervescent Miss Kisselgoff soon got to the root of her problem.

"This time of year, everybody wants to be reviewed. The tragedy is that dancers _do_ wait until the spring, and then they give their one-shot concert that they have been preparing all year, and it's on the same night that 17 other dancers are giving theirs. I think it's suicidal. ... We have three dance critics at the _Times_ -- Jack Anderson and Jennifer Dunning besides myself -- and in the spring, all three of us are working every day, and we still can't keep up."

Anna herself attends up to nine performances a week during the busy season. Besides her regular pieces in the daily _Times_, she is responsible for a long, comprehensive article in the Sunday edition. "There has been a tremendous increase in dance activity in the past 10 years," she explained. "In 1969, the year after I joined the paper, I was asked to do a rundown of dance events, and I found there was not a single week in the year that was free from dance. That was the first time it happened.

"I think the decade of the 1960s had something to do with it. That was when ch.o.r.eographers like Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, who used pure movement, became most popular. The audience that came to see them was a new audience that was already comfortable with abstraction.

They didn't require story ballets. One of the problems with dance in the past was the people thought they wouldn't be able to understand it. But if you like plotless ballet, you don't have to understand any more than what you see. I think Marshall McLuhan was right: this is the age of television.

This generation is used to watching images without getting bored."

She has no favorite dancers, but her favorite ch.o.r.eographers come down to two -- George Balanchine and Martha Graham. "You don't have any young ch.o.r.eographers now who are really the stature of the old ones. I can't give a reason why, except that it happened historically that the 1930s turned out to be the most creative period in dance -- not just in the United States, but in most parts of the world. That's when the modern dance pioneers became active. People like Martha Graham are revolutionaries, and you just don't get them in every generation. ... This applies to the other arts as well. Who are the great opera composers of today? And frankly, are there any Tolstoys?"

Born in Paris, Anna arrived on the Upper West Side at the age of one.

She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and later spent four years in Paris as a general reporter for several English-language newspapers, but otherwise she has been a lifelong Westsider. Dance has always been one of her prime interests: she studied ballet for 10 years while a child, and remained an avid fan long after realizing she would not become a professional dancer.

In the mid-1960s, Anna wrote an article on a major dance festival for the international edition of the _New York Times_ in Paris. This led to similar a.s.signments. In October 1968, shortly after she returned to Manhattan, the _Times_ hired her to a.s.sist chief dance critic Clive Barnes.

She quickly found herself writing many first-string reviews, and when Barnes resigned almost two years ago, Kisselgoff was named to replace him.

One of the disadvantages of her job, Anna pointed out, is that she is frequently approached by strangers at intermission. "I feel that everybody who agrees or disagrees with me can do so by mail. I don't want to have long discussions with people I don't know, because I think it's an invasion of my privacy as a person."

The advantages, however, far outweigh the inconveniences. "I can even enjoy bad dance," she quickly added. "That's why I'm very happy doing this job. The day that I'll no longer be interested in watching a dance performance, I think I should quit and go on to something else."

WESTSIDER GEORGE LANG Owner of the Cafe des Artistes

8-4-79

George Lang, artist and perfectionist, could have become a success in any of a hundred professions. In 1946, when he arrived in the U.S. from his native Hungary, he got a job as violinist with the Dallas Symphony. But Lang soon discovered that the orchestra pit was too confining for a man of his vision. He might have turned to composition or conducting; instead he decided to switch to a different field entirely -- cooking. Today, at 54, he is the George Balanchine of the food world -- a "culinary ch.o.r.eographer" with an international reputation for knowing virtually everything relevant that is to be known about food preparation and restaurants.

Lang's imagination, _Gourmet_ magazine once wrote, "is as fertile as the Indus Valley." This imagination, combined with his keen intelligence, his concern for details, his natural versatility, and his seemingly endless capacity for work, have enabled him to rewrite the definition of the term "restaurant consultant."

As head of the George Lang Corporation, a loosely structured group of a.s.sociates that he founded in 1971, he commands $2,500 a day plus expenses for jetting around the world, giving advice on restaurant and kitchen design, menu planning, and every other aspect of a restaurant from the lighting to the color of the napkins.

His large-scale projects in the past few years include food consulting and design for Marriot Motor Hotels, Holiday Inn, the Cunard Lines, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. He was the chief planner for The Market, a three-level, 20-shop marketplace in the East Side's Citicorp Center. In 1975, when he took over the West Side's famous Cafe des Artistes, the business quadrupled within weeks.

A prolific author as well, Lang has written several books and hundreds of articles for leading publications, including the _Encyclopedia Britannica_.

His column, "Table for One," is a regular feature of _Travel & Leisure_ magazine. He has bottled burgundy under his own label, arranged parties for the rich and famous, and served as consultant for _Time-Life's_ series on international cookery.