Lucie Arnaz
So you're back at the Imperial Theatre almost 27 years after your Broadway debut...
Look behind you [a softball shirt embossed with the logo of They're Playing Our Song is draped over the dressing room's guest chair]. I got a note from two of the ushers: "Fran and Debbie welcome you back to the Imperial Theater. We were there then and we're happy to be ushering for you again." Can you believe that? Both of them happened to have these softball shirts, and they gave me one for my opening. It was very kind.
Your dad did a show here, too, right?
Yes, I actually put it in my bio in the program. He was in Too Many Girls 40 years before I was here. There's something magical about this street. The last time I came back to Broadway, I did Lost in Yonkers next door at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
How did the opportunity to play Muriel come about?
I got a phone call from my manager, who said, "You've been asked to replace Joanna Gleason in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels." And I said, "I don't believe it." This was my favorite show of last season, and I'm a Tony voter so I saw everything. Then he told me the dates, and they conflicted with this play [Sonia Flew] I was scheduled to do with my daughter in Florida at the now infamous Coconut Grove Playhouse. It was a really good play that I had been waiting two years to do, it was going to close out their 50th season, and I didn't want to disappoint my daughter. So I turned this down! Well, they talked Joanna into staying for a few more weeks, put an understudy in and called me back and said, "We'll wait for you." I was thrilled.
It's a great part for you.
It's such a perfect part. You don't have to carry the whole show, and every time you go onstage you're given these wonderful bits of gold to sing and to say. And it's real—it's funny, but you can play it honestly, and that's my favorite kind of comedy. It's difficult because it's so off the wall, and yet the people in it succeed only if they play it dead seriously. I still watch from the wings every night because I'm fascinated by how good everyone is and how good the material is. Jeffrey Lane wrote a really funny, bright and savvy book, and David Yazbek probably needs to be hospitalized, he's so brilliant and so out there. This show just cooks.
Was Rachel York [formerly Christine] nervous about meeting you? I heard you didn't like the 2003 TV movie she did in which she played your mother.
No, wait! I didn't like the first movie [Lucy and Desi: Before the Laughter, with Frances Fisher as Ball]. The second movie was way better. I never said I didn't like it. I thought it was actually as good as they could have done under the circumstances. I could tell that Rachel really did her homework, and I thought Danny Pino was good as my dad. Rachel was very kind to say that [her preparation was made easier] because they could watch the Lucy-Desi documentary we made. There were things that no one could have known unless they saw our film. The thing I didn't like about the first movie was it was so tabloid-esque. I guess Rachel was a little nervous, but she's a doll and we're buddies. We're eating together between shows today.
Are you excited about being part of the new Dirty Rotten Scoundrels cast that's coming in this summer? [Keith Carradine, Brian d'Arcy James and Richard Kind will replace Jonathan Pryce, Norbert Leo Butz and Gregory Jbara, respectively.]
I'm sure it will be brilliant because they got great people, but it's a little scary because the show works so well right now. But I remember Greg Jbara saying that he was nervous about Joanna leaving because he felt so secure with her, and I thought, "Oh dear, he's going to hate me." But it took us only one night: I work the way he does. I don't like to go out there and go, "Here come the jokes." It terrifies me now to know where some of the big laughs usually are. I have to forget about it every single night and go back out there and play the story. You can get into a lot of trouble with comedy if you play what you know works.
You spent a year in London six years ago starring in The Witches of Eastwick. Was it a big disappointment that the show didn't make it to New York?
What a cast you had— Ian McShane is now starring in Deadwood.
It's great. And Maria Friedman, who got gypped out of a Tony nomination this year for The Woman in White, just as you did for They're Playing Our Song.
You didn't have a huge amount of stage experience when you got They're Playing Our Song, did you?
What an incredible break that was.
Could you see the show being revived now?
Wow! What an idea.
It was such an entertaining show. I've often wondered if the book would hold up in a revival.
My choice would be Idina Menzel and Matthew Broderick.
Let's talk about the beginning of your theater career. When did you realize you had talent as a singer?
Vivian Vance really encouraged you to pursue theater, didn't she?
Were your parents supportive of your theater ambitions?
… because people thought of her a tough perfectionist.
You and your husband, Laurence Luckinbill, had what sounds like a real Broadway romance when you were doing They're Playing Our Song and he was doing Chapter Two.
And the other two kids are named for Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, right?
Did you and your husband feel an instant connection that day at Joe Allen's?
Your husband already had two young sons when you married. Wasn't he brave to be willing to have three more kids?
He is 17 years older than you. Do you feel the age difference differently now than when you first married?
The two of you have worked together often over the years, haven't you?
Were the kids traveling with you on all these tours?
And now your daughter wants to be an actress.
Are either of your sons interested in the business?
How are you different as a mom than your mother was with you?
Are you surprised that so many people are still obsessed with your mom?
How much time do spend on the business side of your parents' legacy?
See Lucie Arnaz in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels at the Imperial Theatre, 249 West 45th Street. Click for tickets and more information.
I can, because after learning things the hard way for many years, I was trying not to be a disappearing mom anymore. I thought I could drag my kids all over the country and do nightclub shows, leave town and come back and have wonderful housekeepers, but it doesn't really work. People think you can have it all? Look again. You can have it all, but there's a price. Unfortunately, usually it's the kid or the career that gets the short end of the stick, and for me, it looked like it was my kids at one point. So Larry and I made a lot of changes. I said, "I'm not leaving town unless you're going to be at home," and vice versa. I didn't want an eight-show-a-week gig anywhere for a long period of time. I'd do short runs in various places, but not a long Broadway run. And it's paid off. I've done regional theaters and my nightclub act and concerts and movies and stuff, but I've also been learning a lot about what can happen in your life and in your marriage. I'm at a good age to come back now with what I've experienced for the last 20 years.
I'll tell you the truth. The biggest disappointment about The Witches of Eastwick was that the script and the music I read didn't make it to the stage. I think there was a better show there than what we ended up with. And even though we had groupies who saw the show 17 times and we got phenomenal reviews, it didn't get the kind of savvy buzz that something like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels would get because there was something missing. It was making fun of itself a little too much. It didn't have the reality and the heart that this show does. I hate to say it, but it kind of got dumbed down. I think the authors agree. I would love to see somebody do the original show as written, because it was very much like the film. It was dark and funny and scary and romantic at the same time. I don't think we did that show, so in a way I was just as happy we didn't bring it over here.
I've never seen that. Is it good?
Oh well [laughs]. It worked to my advantage that year because there was so much hoopla about me not getting nominated that to this day, people think I won! All they remember is the hoop-de-doo about me and the Tonys. Joe Kipness, a producer who owned Joe's Stone Crab in New York, took out a full-page ad in Variety, and he wasn't even one of our producers. He was just somebody who was ticked off about it! I thought, "You know, you couldn't buy publicity like this." So it was better than winning. But those things happen. I felt bad for Jonathan Pryce not receiving the replacement Tony in the first year they were going to have it. I'm actually on the Tony Administration Committee, but I can't take responsibility because I hadn't gone to any of the meetings this year because I was doing two plays. It's a good idea to have a replacement Tony, but I don't think they figured out what the criteria should be. Unfortunately, he got caught it that.
Not really. I had done six and a half years on the Here's Lucy show, and some summer stock and the national company of Seesaw with Tommy Tune, directed by Michael Bennett, which was a fast learning curve. And I had done a wonderful production of Annie Get Your Gun at Jones Beach for the entire summer just before I got the part. It was wild—your sets would come in on pontoons and boats! Someone saw me in that and called me in to audition for [composer] Marvin Hamlisch and [book writer] Neil Simon. But compared to a lot of other people, I was really new.
It really was. I was the first person to audition and then I had to wait for almost two months through 200 other people's auditions before I got the part. During that time you'd hear, "Bette Midler is doing it" or "Cher is doing it," or "Streisand is coming in." I was dying! After all that time, they asked me to come back and sing again, and I thought I did a horrible audition. Marvin came up and said, "You were terrific," and I thought, "He's just being nice. I will never get this job." But before I got home, I had a message that I had gotten the part. It was thrilling. I had lost sleep thinking, "This is my part. This is the part I've been waiting for all my life."
Yeah, I could. In fact, we had a reading not too long ago with Marvin and Neil and Robert [Klein] and the original stage manager. We all got together because Neil wanted to hear if the script still worked without changing the era. You wouldn't change where it took place because the music is of the 70s, but they wanted Robert and me to try to do it again.
Yeah! I kind of thought, "Well, why not?" We took a good look at ourselves in the mirror and said, "Why do these people have to be 28?" They could be 48; they could be 35 and 40; they could be whatever we look like onstage now. The script actually works better if you have a little age on you. I'm better mentally to play that part now than I was then. But it turns out that Robert doesn't want to commit to the whole eight-show-a-week thing. And you can't blame him—he has a really great life doing concerts and tours. He wasn't too thrilled with doing the same thing night after night in 1979!
I'm not such an egomaniac that I feel like it has to be done with me, but it would be fun. The only way I would have done it, truthfully, is as a big benefit and then maybe a limited run; call it a "reunion tour" and use as many of the original people as possible. Everybody except our wonderful director, Robert Moore, is still alive and working. But I don't know if we could talk Donna Murphy and Debbie Shapiro into being the backup girls. [laughs] Do it as a moneymaker for Broadway Cares and then just leave it to someone like Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott. They'd be phenomenal.
There are 5,000 people who could do it today. They're great parts. We just wanted to see if they needed to be a particular age, and Neil decided it would work at any age. He didn't make one change in the script after hearing our reading. All he said was, "I want to go back and fix that recording studio scene; I think I made it a little too mean."
Well, when you grow up lip-synching to albums and then you try to sing, it's a little embarrassing because you discover you don't really sound like Ann-Margret after all. [laughs] So you have to find out who you do sound like. I took lessons from somebody who used to write music for my mother's show. When I was 13 or 14, I thought, "Not great, but keep at it, girl." And after years of being told, "Learn this—you're singing it next week on Here's Lucy," you develop a style of your own. We did seven or eight huge musical numbers every year on that show, pre-recorded with orchestra. And I thought, "I like this musical stuff." There's rhythm in my bones, and a lot of that comes from my dad.
Yeah, she used to come and watch me do plays at Immaculate Heart High School. It had a fabulous drama department, which is why I chose it. She was a guest almost every year on Here's Lucy, and after about four years, she said, "What do you do on your hiatus?" I said, "We go to Palm Springs, we go to Hawaii," all the fabulous vacation spots, and she said, "Why aren't you going back to theater? You don't want to get typecast and stuck on a situation comedy for the rest of your life." I thought, "What an odd thing to say. Everybody wants to be in a hit TV show, and she's telling me to go back to the stage." But she was so right. She knew that if I didn't do theater then, it would be very hard to break the stereotype. And she ought to know because she was Ethel Mertz for the rest of her life, and she didn't want to be.
It did, indeed. I may have diversified my portfolio a little too much over the years because I kept jumping around from one medium to the other, but I learned a lot and it makes me happy to know I've done all that stuff.
My parents were always supportive of anything I wanted to do, which is the nicest thing I can say about parents in general. Most parents are not like that. Trying to save their kids heartache, they tend to pooh-pooh some of the things the kids want to do: "Oh, you'll never succeed, you're not pretty enough, you're not talented enough." I had lots of friends whose parents used to say horrible things like that to them. But my mother and dad always said, "You can do anything you want." That was so freeing. And when I did a show, whether it was a high school production or a television show or the opening of the Academy Awards, my mother would come backstage and say, "I don't know how you do it. I have no notes for you." She said that to me a thousand times. Really, coming from her…
I don't know that I'm that kind to my own daughter! I tell her she's wonderful, but I try to help her here and there. My mother never did that.
Hence, the name of our firstborn child, Simon!
We have Joseph Henry; Larry and I met at Joe Allen's restaurant on September 10, 1979. [laughs] And I always admired Katharine Hepburn, not only as an actress but as a woman. I thought, "If I ever have a daughter, I want to give her the name Katharine." It wasn't going to be another Lucie, thank you very much! Katharine with an "a," and Desiree, which was my grandmother's name, my mother's middle name and my middle name. We would pass that down instead of the Lucie.
Kind of, but he was coming off of a very nasty divorce and I had just been burned very badly in a rebound relationship. I knew how guys like to fall in love very quickly and then drop that person like a hot potato, and I didn't want to be the potato again. I was just friendly with Larry at first and dated other people, but by end of November, we started seeing each other as more than friends. I had started this group called the Matinee Idles, for people who found themselves going out to eat alone between shows. One by one, the group built to as many as 15 people. I would choose a restaurant and call around at the beginning of the matinee and say, "Call me by intermission if you are coming." Then I'd make a reservation and we would go. We're thinking of starting it up again; Bob Martin of The Drowsy Chaperone said he would love to do that and Tim Jerome, who was in Lost in Yonkers with me, is next door at Tarzan, so we'll see if we can get the Matinee Idles going again.
I swear to god, if he hadn't had a vasectomy, we would have had seven. [laughs] It seemed like every time I kissed him good night, I got pregnant. Larry loves children and he is an absolutely phenomenal father. I know what the word "devoted" means when I watch him be a dad. When a kid needs attention, he's there instead of writing the play he wants to write or whatever he is supposed to be doing.
Sure. The older you get, the more the age difference seems to be apparent. It's a little scary because I want to be with him all my life. And chances are, if we both live healthy lives and not get hit by a bus, I will have to say good-bye to him before he says good-bye to me. That will be very difficult, but I kind of knew that when I met him. But there aren't that many really great men out there. I was tired of the twinkies and the games and the people who didn't want to commit, and he wasn't going to be like that. He took a big risk by marrying me, because I wasn't half as mature as I should have been to commit to this guy with two kids.
We've done a lot of wonderful shows together. We did a sold-out summer tour of They're Playing Our Song, and he was absolutely fantastic as Vernon Gersch. We did a tour of I Do, I Do. We did The Guardsman at the Paper Mill Playhouse. We did the American premiere of Educating Rita, directed by Mike Ockrent. They tried to Americanize it; it didn't work, but we had fun. We did the national tour of Social Security directed by Mike Nichols.
Often they were. When we did Whose Life Is It Anyway? I was pregnant with my first child and we switched off the roles. On Broadway, it starred Tom Conti and then Mary Tyler Moore, and they said, "Which version will tour?" We suggested that we do both, which was great. Then we did a movie together called The Mating Season for CBS. But I stopped working with him when I got a phone call from somebody who said, "I just had the most wonderful script sent to me that would be perfect for you, but there isn't a good part for Larry so I knew you wouldn't want to read it." After that, I made a conscious effort to take things by myself to show that that's not true, which is kind of a shame because he is great to work with.
With two actors, it's very difficult. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. Because if you really want to be the best in your career, you have to go where they ask you to go and somebody's got to trail along. If the other person is not available to trail, you don't see them much. It's tough.
Yes, and I tell her the same thing. She's dating a guy right now who is a doll. She's young, she's probably not going to get married, but even so…
My middle son, Joe, is a commercial music major, graduating next year. He's a guitarist and wants to go into the recording industry. My son Simon is not in the business; he's a raw foodist and naturalist who sells health products on the internet. He also plays drums, and he's going to be with me when I perform at Birdland on my birthday. I'm doing a show on July 17, my day off. It's Lucie's Birthday Bash at Birdland. Simon is going to play congas, Billy Stritch is going to play some stuff with us, my conductor, Ron Abel, is coming in from L.A. and I have some surprise friends who will come by.
I'm a lot like her in many, many ways. She was very responsible and worried a lot about the welfare of her kids. She tried to be as hands-on as she could, but I try to be a little more fun, too. I worked hard to bond with my kids when they were younger. She wasn't able to do that because she was working all the time. When I mushed my life back together so Larry and I could be home more, I tried to work on that. I hope I did a good job with them. Let's say I did a little bit better than what I got, but still not enough.
No, because their show was freaking brilliant! It was beautifully written and acted, and it's not a surprise to me that it has lasted. They didn't try to do topical humor; it was about love, friendship and work. And they did it really, really well.
More time than I'd like, but it's not something you can turn over to a lawyer because no one can make the decisions for you. If you turn it over to a [licensing] organization, there would be I Love Lucy toilet paper, whatever could make a buck. It was something we inherited, along with a lot of other good stuff. It's not necessarily fun, but we've worked hard to turn it into something valuable as far as what it gives back to the planet. The mission statement of the Lucy-Desi Center in Jamestown, NY, is about healing the world through the power of love and laughter. I started LOL, "Legacy of Laughter" seminars, where we talk about how laughter is healing. That's what I get to do every night in this show, for more than 1,000 people. Laughter is so powerful. I try to take what my parents left behind and use it in a positive way.