Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest is the one and only Harvey Fire Steve,
Speaker 1: who's got a brand new memoir. I was better last night, Harvey.
Speaker 1: Why did you write it because of COVID? Had nothing
Speaker 1: else to do. I'm sitting at home. They shut down
Speaker 1: the theaters, they shut everything down. I'm sitting at home.
Speaker 1: I said, well, I owe a couple of quilts. I
Speaker 1: make quilts, as you might know from reading the book.
Speaker 1: So I said, I owe a wedding quilt. I owe
Speaker 1: a baby quilt. So I said, let me just go
Speaker 1: ahead and make these quilts and catch up, which was great.
Speaker 1: I made five quilts in a row. It was great.
Speaker 1: Everyone loved their quilts. Who doesn't love a nice quilt,
Speaker 1: because you know, as opposed to give him somebody a painting.
Speaker 1: You give somebody a painting, they gotta put it on
Speaker 1: the wall, They got to throw it in the closet
Speaker 1: when you're not there. You know, they gotta hide it
Speaker 1: under the bed or something. But you give him the quilt,
Speaker 1: you let the dog lay in and if you hate it,
Speaker 1: you know, you put it in the car and land
Speaker 1: and use it in the back of the car for
Speaker 1: when people get cold, they faded and if they love it,
Speaker 1: they put it on the bed. So everybody loves the quilt.
Speaker 1: No no, no, no, no, no, no, slow down. How
Speaker 1: did you get into quilting? And how long does it
Speaker 1: take to make one quilt? Oh? Usually I can turn
Speaker 1: out too quilts a year, but with COVID and nothing
Speaker 1: else to do, I was just putting out. Um and
Speaker 1: how did I get into quilting? A show on PBS.
Speaker 1: There was a show on PBS many years ago about sewing,
Speaker 1: and um. I always was sort of interested in sewing.
Speaker 1: My father sewed because he was in the business of
Speaker 1: how he was in the baggage of business. He was
Speaker 1: in the schmount To trade. He he managed a factory
Speaker 1: for the Guinea family, the miss Rockies and the Guineas,
Speaker 1: and so he knew how to sew. We had a
Speaker 1: professional sewing machine in our basement. My mother sewed. UM.
Speaker 1: I always thought it was kind of cool. Maybe you
Speaker 1: could make a piece of clothing or something. I don't know. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I started watching a sewing program and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I'm making quilts, which was a lot of fun. Um,
Speaker 1: and I've been doing it's close to thirty years. Okay,
Speaker 1: so in thirty years, what you learn now that you
Speaker 1: didn't know that? In terms of making quilts, Um, you
Speaker 1: start out. When you start out, you do those traditional
Speaker 1: quilts and the traditional pattern he cut triangles and stuff
Speaker 1: like that as you go along. Well, also the the
Speaker 1: whole art quilt movement that has changed. There's a whole
Speaker 1: art quilt movement now. Um people do incredible work. Um,
Speaker 1: stuff that's never meant to be on the bed. It's
Speaker 1: meant to be on wall, and so it's totally freeing
Speaker 1: this this. I don't die fabric, but many people die fabric.
Speaker 1: People paint on fabric, people use three dimensional stuff and
Speaker 1: all that I don't do. I'm I'm like, put it
Speaker 1: on the bed. People want something to put on the bed.
Speaker 1: I put it on the bed. The wildest I ever
Speaker 1: do is I'll make matching pillowcases. Oh, matching pillow gaze.
Speaker 1: My nephew just called me and said, can I get
Speaker 1: matching pillow gases for this? And I said, sorry, no,
Speaker 1: you gotta get in line. Okay, when you do quiote,
Speaker 1: how long will you quote it one time? And will
Speaker 1: you multitask watch TV? Or is it to require complete concentration. No.
Speaker 1: I used to leave the TV on all the time,
Speaker 1: and I found I wasn't really listening to it or
Speaker 1: watching it or anything. So why bother? So it doesn't
Speaker 1: really matter. I do turn the TV on, but it
Speaker 1: really doesn't matter. You get into a whole rhythm. Now.
Speaker 1: Remember I'm not I'm not quilting by hand. I'm quilting
Speaker 1: by machine. So you're cutting fabric, You're you're falling in
Speaker 1: love with different fabrics, you're putting fabrics together. Okay, so
Speaker 1: lockdown begins. You're quilting. You find you have a lot
Speaker 1: of time on your hands. How do you end up
Speaker 1: writing the memoir? An agent said to me when I said,
Speaker 1: I'm going to kill myself. I can't take another quilt.
Speaker 1: I've delivered by five quilts, and and I must say,
Speaker 1: three years later, I still have two more quilts cut
Speaker 1: out on my tables downstairs, waiting to be sowed. But
Speaker 1: I just had had enough um and I said to
Speaker 1: my agent, you know, is this gonna end? And he
Speaker 1: said probably not. Why don't you write your memoir? And
Speaker 1: I said, I don't write prose. I mean I write articles.
Speaker 1: I write opinion piece and stuff like that, but a
Speaker 1: book is like it's a book. I said, I don't write,
Speaker 1: and he said, well, why don't you try? And I thought, yeah,
Speaker 1: why don't you? What the funk? No one's gonna know. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and with the computer and all that, you don't
Speaker 1: have to get the spelling right. And and if you
Speaker 1: get editor, he'll fix what you what you can't say right?
Speaker 1: Try it. So I sat down and I wrote, um,
Speaker 1: not not what the preface is, but you. But in
Speaker 1: the very first chapter, I tell a story about being
Speaker 1: in third grade or second grade. I think, um, where
Speaker 1: where we were doing Sleeping Beauty? And I tell and
Speaker 1: I and I told that story. I wrote that story
Speaker 1: out phil Amina, who played the wicked witch in in
Speaker 1: Sleeping Beauty. She and I are still friends. I don't
Speaker 1: give up friends, eazy. They gotta die on me, that's
Speaker 1: or or say something nasty, nasty and death. Those are
Speaker 1: the ways out. So Philomina and I are still friends,
Speaker 1: you know. Sixties something years later. And I take that
Speaker 1: little story and I sent it to Philomena, figuring she'll
Speaker 1: get a laugh out of it. In return, she sent
Speaker 1: me the photograph that's in the book of of Me
Speaker 1: and Drag, which is what the story was about getting
Speaker 1: into dragons seven years old? And UM, I said, if
Speaker 1: she kept that photograph for all these years and that
Speaker 1: story was important enough for her to remember and me
Speaker 1: to remember, it might mean something to somebody else, I'm
Speaker 1: going to keep going. So I kept going. I wrote
Speaker 1: probably three chapters, four chapters, gave it to my agent.
Speaker 1: My agent gave it to a literary agent, who said,
Speaker 1: this is good. I said, what do you know? I
Speaker 1: could write? You know, well, do you know Tony Awards
Speaker 1: didn't necessarily have to write? Uh? There was there was, Uh,
Speaker 1: there was the best musical, the best book of a musical.
Speaker 1: Once went to UM a show that had no dialogue
Speaker 1: at all. It was it was an all Dan show.
Speaker 1: I forget what the name of the show, but uh,
Speaker 1: you gotta so. Uh. She sent it out to like
Speaker 1: nine publishers, and every one of them made a bid
Speaker 1: to buy it somebody, you know. So I I picked
Speaker 1: an editor that I thought would be the right editor.
Speaker 1: I picked the guy who edited the two big Stephen
Speaker 1: Sondheim volumes of lyrics. I figured, if he's good enough
Speaker 1: for Steve, he's good enough Harvey and uh. And I
Speaker 1: also liked other works of his. But that's really how
Speaker 1: I saw it. And he was and he's with Coop,
Speaker 1: and you can't really do better than connob though they
Speaker 1: they paid the least of all the offers, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's only money. So that's how I chose him. And
Speaker 1: he turned out to be a fabulous editor who basically
Speaker 1: just kept saying, go, go, go, go go. He changed
Speaker 1: very little in the in the book, made one or
Speaker 1: two suggestions. I mean literally, he was just this wonderful,
Speaker 1: wonderful cheerleader for me, um to just keep me going.
Speaker 1: And uh, I got this book, which turned out to
Speaker 1: be a New York Times best seller, hit me with
Speaker 1: a brick. So you talked about the computer correcting, spelling, etcetera.
Speaker 1: When you wrote it. How much did the editor change,
Speaker 1: like construction intense or was it really pretty much the
Speaker 1: way you wrote it? It's the way I wrote it.
Speaker 1: It's it was really sort of surprising, I think because
Speaker 1: I used the theatrical mindset writing it. I used how
Speaker 1: I would tell a story in a play or a movie,
Speaker 1: so um so that gave me the structure. I allowed
Speaker 1: each chapter to be its own story. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: not an anthology by any means, but I allowed it
Speaker 1: each one to stand on their own, hopefully. UM. The
Speaker 1: only structural thing he wanted to change was there's a
Speaker 1: story at the end of the book about my mother
Speaker 1: and I that he wanted me that that took place
Speaker 1: when I was fourteen. He wanted me to put it
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the book when I was fourteen,
Speaker 1: and I said, no, you're you're, you're, You're wrong. It
Speaker 1: belongs where it is. It's it's um because it was
Speaker 1: actually inspired by something that happened between my brother and
Speaker 1: I in present time, and and I knew that that
Speaker 1: was the way that I wanted to end the book.
Speaker 1: I wanted that memory. I wanted that that memory between
Speaker 1: my brother and I, that memory between my mother and I,
Speaker 1: to bring me to that moment um, which I thought
Speaker 1: was a good ending for the book. Now, a book,
Speaker 1: to write, the whole book is not something you can
Speaker 1: do in a day. But when you wrote this memoir,
Speaker 1: which of course reflects your life, which is linear with
Speaker 1: ups and downs. When you do your creative work and
Speaker 1: you do this book, do you start out not knowing
Speaker 1: where you're going to go? Or do you have the
Speaker 1: bones of it and you're just filling in having never
Speaker 1: written this stuff before. Um, I had no idea none.
Speaker 1: I knew my life, I knew I knew where I
Speaker 1: was born, and I knew where I was at the
Speaker 1: present moment, and I knew most of what I remembered
Speaker 1: a lot of what went on between. So I guess
Speaker 1: that means you know the structure in some way. But no,
Speaker 1: I didn't know what stories there was several. What I
Speaker 1: would do is I would sit down at the computer
Speaker 1: every day and write a chapter. I basically wrote a
Speaker 1: chapter a day. Um, sometimes they went back and edit it,
Speaker 1: but but I basically wrote one of those chapters every day.
Speaker 1: And I think, how many chapters are in this stupid thing? Uh?
Speaker 1: Too many? There are fifty nine chapters, so so you know,
Speaker 1: at least two months. But I probably probably took me
Speaker 1: about four months to write, which still is pretty fast.
Speaker 1: But when there's nothing else going on in the world,
Speaker 1: you know, it was the most exciting. I started it
Speaker 1: during the summer, so I did have friends come over
Speaker 1: to visit because we could see outside. You know, you
Speaker 1: couldn't have people in the house because and everybody had
Speaker 1: you know, we rolled lepers and stuff. It was like
Speaker 1: a scene at a ben her with her mother and
Speaker 1: sister hiding behind the stone the lepers. But um, so
Speaker 1: I still had friends come over for play dates with
Speaker 1: the dogs and stuff like that. But other than that,
Speaker 1: there was shopping for food, and there was cooking, and
Speaker 1: there was the computer and I guess streaming television. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you finished the book. You're deep in the groove.
Speaker 1: Now when you're finished and it's done, it's going to
Speaker 1: be exposed to the public. Were you anxious about that?
Speaker 1: Did you said, well, maybe it's not that good, or
Speaker 1: he said, no, this is great. Everyone's gonna love it. Um,
Speaker 1: I've written enough stuff. I'm seventy years old. I've been writing,
Speaker 1: even though I never wanted to be a writer. I've
Speaker 1: been writing since I was twenties. So it's fifty years
Speaker 1: of putting yourself out there. Um, people are gonna think
Speaker 1: what they're gonna think. There's people who are gonna love
Speaker 1: what you write, and these people who are gonna hate
Speaker 1: what you write. And I'm more than used to that,
Speaker 1: so I I really try not to judge that. If
Speaker 1: I want to put something out, if I feel it's
Speaker 1: true and I'm gonna put it out, I put it out.
Speaker 1: I don't read reviews anymore. I used to read reviews,
Speaker 1: and they didn't do me any good. Um, they only
Speaker 1: heard and um, because you never remember the good ones,
Speaker 1: you only remember the bad ones. And so uh, I
Speaker 1: changed names. I did right to several people and say,
Speaker 1: I've written this memoir, I've written about you. Do you
Speaker 1: want me to use your real name? I'm more than
Speaker 1: willing to change names, and like people I don't talk to,
Speaker 1: I changed their names. But there were there were a
Speaker 1: couple of excellent overs that wanted their names used. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of them doesn't speak to me anymore.
Speaker 1: I used his real name and he stopped speaking to me.
Speaker 1: But he told me to please use his real name.
Speaker 1: So I think there's a difference. I think I would
Speaker 1: if I didn't it over again. I just change everybody's
Speaker 1: name because I signed on to tell my truth. They didn't.
Speaker 1: I signed on to tell my story they didn't, And
Speaker 1: of course my story about them is going to be
Speaker 1: different than they remember it, so it only makes sense
Speaker 1: to allow them that fictionalized cover. Okay, so a book
Speaker 1: is a different artwork from a player a movie in
Speaker 1: terms of promotion. In the sales arc, what was that
Speaker 1: like doing that for the first time. It was very
Speaker 1: low pressure because didn't know anything about it. You know,
Speaker 1: I published plays. There are books out of my plays,
Speaker 1: but I don't have to do anything. They sell them
Speaker 1: in the lobby, or they sell them at theater, book stuffs.
Speaker 1: You know, it's nothing you have to do. So I
Speaker 1: was very curious, especially since COVID was going on and
Speaker 1: I had very little else to do. I was very
Speaker 1: curious as to what it would be like to sell
Speaker 1: the book and and and do all that stuff. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff to do, a lot of interviews,
Speaker 1: but most of them were on Zoom, which is why
Speaker 1: I'm I'm pretty good at zoom and well, I think
Speaker 1: we all have gotten so good at zoom and Uh.
Speaker 1: I did do some book signings that were fun. I
Speaker 1: did some personal appearances that have been fun. Uh. I
Speaker 1: don't think I read. I read a few. You know,
Speaker 1: here's what I say about reviews. You don't really have
Speaker 1: to read them. If they're bad, your friends will call
Speaker 1: it tell you. If they're good, you'll see them in
Speaker 1: the ad. You know. It's like, I go to Amazon
Speaker 1: and they got all those quotes about the book, so
Speaker 1: I didn't have to read any of those reviews. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're They're all there. And as far and like I said,
Speaker 1: as far as the bad ones, your friends will called.
Speaker 1: I don't know how he said that you're so stupid,
Speaker 1: because I don't think you're so stupid. I get it, okay. Also,
Speaker 1: there's an audio version. Tell me about the creation of that.
Speaker 1: And uh, because a lot of people listen to books
Speaker 1: on tape, as they say, even though it's no longer
Speaker 1: any tape, that was a That was the challenge that
Speaker 1: I knew I was going to have to face. I
Speaker 1: do voices, and I do narration for movies. I've I've
Speaker 1: done the narration for several films, including the Academy Award
Speaker 1: winning Times of Harvey Milk and and a few other
Speaker 1: and I do voices of cartoons and stuff. So I'm
Speaker 1: comfortable doing voice over work. The first book that I
Speaker 1: did was my play Bella Bella about Bella abzug Um.
Speaker 1: We did a recording of the entire play. It's a
Speaker 1: one person play, and so I did that recording. So
Speaker 1: I was that that is the background, but I already
Speaker 1: had that memorized, so I had the pages in front
Speaker 1: of me and I could read from the page, but
Speaker 1: it was already memorized. I'm very dyslexic. As I say
Speaker 1: in the book. The idea of sitting down and reading
Speaker 1: an entire book, especially UH fifty nine chapter book, was
Speaker 1: really frightening to me. So I said, could we get
Speaker 1: a studio that was low pressure, which I thought meant,
Speaker 1: don't go into the city to and go into that
Speaker 1: evil city of New York because they're they're used to that,
Speaker 1: They're used to people being very professional and reading. And
Speaker 1: I lucked out. And they found this fabulous guy who
Speaker 1: has a beautiful Victorian painted lady about half hour from
Speaker 1: me ah and in his guesthouse slash garage, he's built
Speaker 1: this beautiful studio where he does all kinds of recordings
Speaker 1: and all kinds of celebrities have recorded their books there
Speaker 1: and it's just you and him and no pressure because
Speaker 1: he'll put in as many days as it takes. So
Speaker 1: I think they told me I should figure on three
Speaker 1: to four days to do the book. It took me six,
Speaker 1: because like I said, I'm so dyslexic, but I just
Speaker 1: took my time and did it. Um. The only there
Speaker 1: was it was all manageable. Even the sad stuff was manageable.
Speaker 1: There was one section that I read aloud and I
Speaker 1: had to leave the building, and for the life of me,
Speaker 1: I can't remember what it was, but I will remember
Speaker 1: what it was. I read that section and I had
Speaker 1: to leave. Um. I became very emotional, which I had
Speaker 1: already lived through writing the book and editing it. So
Speaker 1: I sort of shocked myself, UM to have that kind
Speaker 1: of reaction. And like I said, at this moment, I
Speaker 1: can't even think what it was. And it's not something
Speaker 1: that that would knock out a reader. A reader would
Speaker 1: understand what I was saying in that section, but to me,
Speaker 1: it just it just ripped me apart when I read
Speaker 1: it out loud. Okay, many cases they have people who
Speaker 1: were professionals who that's what they do, read books for,
Speaker 1: you know, and then the other things. You are a performer,
Speaker 1: both naturally and in front of the camera and on stage.
Speaker 1: So when you approach the book, did you view it
Speaker 1: as a performance? What attitude did you bring into the
Speaker 1: reading of it. I thought the way to do it
Speaker 1: is to just be as honest as I could be.
Speaker 1: Just be like you and me talking here, not for
Speaker 1: public consumption, not big, but just the two of us talking,
Speaker 1: I'm telling you this story, and and that's what I
Speaker 1: wanted it to sound like. I wanted it to sound
Speaker 1: like I was sitting in your car, because I think
Speaker 1: most people listen to these things in the car, and
Speaker 1: I wanted you to feel I was sitting in your
Speaker 1: in your passenger seats, saying, oh wait, I gotta tell
Speaker 1: you this story. And that's what I wanted it to
Speaker 1: sound like. And so that's that's what I went for.
Speaker 1: Um now, and then I did a little bit of
Speaker 1: a car out to voice, you know, if I was
Speaker 1: doing an invitation of somebody, which I don't do very much,
Speaker 1: but but I did because I also feel that I'm
Speaker 1: not exactly positive that I would get every word right
Speaker 1: if I quoted somebody, so I didn't. I tried to
Speaker 1: give you an impression of what someone said, rather than
Speaker 1: actually put words in their mouths unless they were already dead. Okay,
Speaker 1: have you got I know you don't read your reviews,
Speaker 1: but you've got any specific feedback from friends, family, other
Speaker 1: maybe unknown people who reach out to you about the
Speaker 1: audio version as opposed to the reprinted version. No, my friends,
Speaker 1: my friends all read the book because it was done
Speaker 1: way before the audio version, so then I know. But
Speaker 1: thanks to social media, you get strangers writing to you,
Speaker 1: and I know, and I get a lot of comments
Speaker 1: from people that read the book. I have that listened
Speaker 1: to the book, and even a lot of people who
Speaker 1: say they read the book while listening to the book,
Speaker 1: which I found really interesting. That's, I guess, a very
Speaker 1: fully immersive way to do that. But but never a
Speaker 1: negative word. Knock wood, knock wood. I have not, They
Speaker 1: have not written to me a negative word. I'm sure
Speaker 1: this this is a world of negativity, so I'm sure
Speaker 1: that's negative out there, but not to me. Okay, how
Speaker 1: much do you participate on social media? Both surfing yourself, posting,
Speaker 1: interacting with people you don't know. I don't serve myself
Speaker 1: because I'll find myself. And like I said, it's like
Speaker 1: reading reviews. You don't want to go looking for trouble.
Speaker 1: Life is hard enough without looking for trouble. It's like
Speaker 1: look walking down the street and saying, there's not a
Speaker 1: mugger on this block. Let me walk on the next block.
Speaker 1: Maybe I can find a mugger. You like, I'm looking
Speaker 1: for a mugger. So no, I don't do that, but
Speaker 1: I am on I joined them all for different reasons.
Speaker 1: But I'm on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. I was
Speaker 1: on TikTok for a moment or two, but I don't
Speaker 1: think I ever posted anything, and I was even They
Speaker 1: even made me join LinkedIn because these are tools to
Speaker 1: sell the book to, you know, to help, and I
Speaker 1: had and I have a website which hasn't been updated
Speaker 1: in six months and nights whatever, But that was also
Speaker 1: to help. So I did all that stuff they told
Speaker 1: me has to be done. Um, I mostly Facebook. I
Speaker 1: do do with friends I belonged to. I mean, I
Speaker 1: have friends that we follow each other and we write
Speaker 1: about our dog. You know. I belong to a Liam
Speaker 1: Burger page because I have a Liemburger, right, I got
Speaker 1: follow other friends and stuff like that. On Instagram, I
Speaker 1: mostly follow friends, but I mostly post stuff about my
Speaker 1: shows coming up. It's advertising, it's it's sharing dates and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Okay, you're a gay icon. Many people
Speaker 1: look up to you. If someone you does it? How
Speaker 1: reachable are you by the Holy eploy? People who are
Speaker 1: not either household names themselves. You haven't met someone posts
Speaker 1: a response to something you write. Is the public too dangerous?
Speaker 1: Or are you open I'm pretty open um. It depends
Speaker 1: on how it would get to me. I mean mostly
Speaker 1: when people post something to me on Facebook or on
Speaker 1: Instagram or one of those things, they're they're usually nice.
Speaker 1: I will hear her about there's a controversy. Oh, kinky boots,
Speaker 1: kinky boots. Um, I just had, I just had a
Speaker 1: I dinner thing for page six. Well, Ginky Boots has
Speaker 1: been brought back off Broadway, which I absolutely love because
Speaker 1: the theater is smaller, so the audience is closer. I
Speaker 1: come from off Broadway, you know, I come from that world,
Speaker 1: so it's a smaller theater. There's no balcony in your way,
Speaker 1: there's no bounce off of balcony for sound. The sound
Speaker 1: in that place is gorgeous. Even Cyndi Lauper, who I
Speaker 1: get so scared to let her in the theater because
Speaker 1: she hates hours how her song sound. Even she's happy
Speaker 1: with the sound in that theater. And like I said,
Speaker 1: you can see from every seat because there's no balcony,
Speaker 1: there's no So I'm really happy with the show off Broadway.
Speaker 1: But I didn't interview um where I said that if
Speaker 1: they make the movie. They were asking me who I
Speaker 1: would put in the movie. I said, well, when I
Speaker 1: wrote the show and years ago, it would have been
Speaker 1: different people. These are young people, but right now I
Speaker 1: would put Harry Styles and Bruno Mars pick two names
Speaker 1: out of nowhere. Well, that explode, I mean, the headlines
Speaker 1: across the universe. But what's really funny to me is
Speaker 1: that some of the argument is Harvey Fierstein casting heterosexual
Speaker 1: men to play gay roles. They're okay, neither one is gay.
Speaker 1: Charlie is heterosexual, and the drag queen is a heterosexual
Speaker 1: cross stress her. He's very clear. The whole second act
Speaker 1: opens with a big number called what a Woman Wants
Speaker 1: about I am what a woman wants ah, And they
Speaker 1: were like tearing me apart that I'd want a heterosexual
Speaker 1: in that role. So that stuff cracks me up. And
Speaker 1: then and then you're on. There were a bunch of
Speaker 1: comments like that, and then it said, well, in Harvey
Speaker 1: fire Stein's opinion, he's heterosexual, Well whose opinion to be?
Speaker 1: I wrote it. In fact, what those idiots don't know,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the truth. What those people don't know
Speaker 1: is that that character, which comes from the movie, the
Speaker 1: English movie that I adapted to make the musical. He
Speaker 1: took that. The writer of the movie took that character
Speaker 1: from a novel about that made a movie you might remember,
Speaker 1: starring Simon senor A called Madame Rosa. Yeah, sure, Madame Rosa,
Speaker 1: the next prostitute. She'd been in in Auschwitz. Now she
Speaker 1: took care of other people's children. Well, her next door
Speaker 1: neighbor is a transvestite, well actually a transsexual waiting to
Speaker 1: have an operation, an xboxer whose father made him be
Speaker 1: a boxer so he would toughen him up. The whole
Speaker 1: character was taken from that novel and putting Kinky boots,
Speaker 1: and then I did an adaptation of that character from
Speaker 1: My Kinky Boots. So these people who are telling me
Speaker 1: I'm wrong don't even know where this came from. But
Speaker 1: that's what I like about stupidity. There's no end of stupidity.
Speaker 1: If you don't stop and ask a question, you're gonna
Speaker 1: stay stupid the rest of your life. And the biggest,
Speaker 1: the biggest enemy of art in every way is prejudice.
Speaker 1: I say in the book. I think it's in the book. Um,
Speaker 1: if you go into a gallery thinking you know what
Speaker 1: a Picasso looks like, I guarantee you will never see
Speaker 1: a Picasso if you if you're gonna go looking for
Speaker 1: what is familiar to you as a Picasso, you'll never
Speaker 1: see what else he painted in that picture. You'll never
Speaker 1: see what else he did. And that's the truth about
Speaker 1: any art. If you walk in thinking you know what
Speaker 1: it should be, you'll never see what it is. And
Speaker 1: that's my problem with critics. Critics think they have to
Speaker 1: be the smartest person in the room. They go to
Speaker 1: see a show. They come in with the history of
Speaker 1: the songwriter, of the book, writer of the subject matter,
Speaker 1: of the distance that they know every Broadway show that
Speaker 1: was ever done, and they come in with all of
Speaker 1: this knowledge to tell you where you fit in. But
Speaker 1: they've walked in with so much prejudice. The only thing
Speaker 1: they haven't come in with is the ticket they paid for,
Speaker 1: which makes a difference. Which makes a difference. They also
Speaker 1: have not come to have a good night out. They've
Speaker 1: come to work. It's not the same experience as an audience,
Speaker 1: not the same experience as an audience that's come to
Speaker 1: have an experience and love what they're seeing. They don't
Speaker 1: buy a ticket to not like it. Some critics too.
Speaker 1: There's a very famous New York critic whose name I
Speaker 1: will not mention. You know, if you're gonna get a
Speaker 1: good reviewer a bad review when he comes into the theater.
Speaker 1: If he brings his beard with him, you're going to
Speaker 1: get a bad review. If he brings his young nephew
Speaker 1: with him, you're going to get a good review. Listen,
Speaker 1: I tell you know, just you know, I talk about
Speaker 1: concerts your brother, in my in me or in that business.
Speaker 1: I don't want to hear a review from someone who's
Speaker 1: not a fan of the act. The people who pay
Speaker 1: what was their experience, people who wanted to like, the
Speaker 1: people who wanted to be there, or the person who's
Speaker 1: never been there before, and it's having that first experience, right,
Speaker 1: I know, thanks to radio and recordings and all that,
Speaker 1: that doesn't happen all that much. We usually buy a
Speaker 1: ticket because we know who the person is. I was
Speaker 1: watching last night, I loved it on the news. Last
Speaker 1: night was the opening of the metric of the season
Speaker 1: at the Metropolitan Opera. So they broadcasted in Times Square
Speaker 1: on the giant screens, and they put out two thousand
Speaker 1: chairs and two thousand people sat, many of whom had
Speaker 1: never seen an opera before. And watched Madeia. Of all
Speaker 1: operas to watch Madeya killing their kids off um and
Speaker 1: they just one woman said, I always nod out in
Speaker 1: the theater. I didn't not out. I sat near the
Speaker 1: whole thing and loved every minute of it. You know,
Speaker 1: being exposed to something like that for the first time,
Speaker 1: it is so wonderful. Now think of that in terms
Speaker 1: of the critic who's walking in having heard calluses Madeia
Speaker 1: and having heard controbusious Madea and you know, in fifty
Speaker 1: recordings of Madeia and seeing forty eight productions of Madeia
Speaker 1: and this one's direction of it and that one's, and
Speaker 1: they're walking in with all of this prejudice of what
Speaker 1: they think Madea should be. Who would you rather hear
Speaker 1: from that woman who said I've never seen nothing like
Speaker 1: this before in my life. Well, this guy who's going
Speaker 1: to tell you how she didn't hit that either way
Speaker 1: she should have hit the e were you on this
Speaker 1: recording from that? He was hit much better? Okay, I
Speaker 1: see you on screen in your office, highly designed, uh
Speaker 1: full of highly designed all wait wait wait wait wait
Speaker 1: let me no, no one can see it anyway. It's
Speaker 1: got nothing to do with the question. I'm asking. My
Speaker 1: point is, you appear to be living a nice lifestyle.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about living alone at this point,
Speaker 1: which begs the question of why you're alone? If you've
Speaker 1: not met the right person, are you ultimately difficult to
Speaker 1: have a relationship with? What do you think about all that? Well,
Speaker 1: I built this house. I've been here. I've been here
Speaker 1: since four but I tore the house down seventeen years ago.
Speaker 1: It was falling apart. It was either put a lot
Speaker 1: of money into fixing the old house that was here
Speaker 1: or just tear it down. So I tore it down because,
Speaker 1: as you can see behind me, I collect folk art
Speaker 1: and outsider art. I like art create. You know, I
Speaker 1: have a degree in painting, but I don't well, I
Speaker 1: do have a collection of of real of a real artist,
Speaker 1: but I love outsider art. I love people that have
Speaker 1: to create that it comes out of a place inside them.
Speaker 1: They have had a painting lesson in their life, a
Speaker 1: carving lesson. I mean the that lamp you see behind me.
Speaker 1: See there's a woman there with a light bulb. I
Speaker 1: have twelve of his lamps. He's a lifetimer in prison.
Speaker 1: He makes those lamps in prison. They all look exactly alike.
Speaker 1: They all have blond hair and blue eyes, and they
Speaker 1: and he makes the clothing out of sleeves from from
Speaker 1: T shirts and stuff like that. And yet he carves
Speaker 1: the name or paints the name in each one. That
Speaker 1: one there, that blonde hair, blue eye is Tina Turner. Oh,
Speaker 1: look exactly. His Hillary Clinton looks exactly like Tina Journal.
Speaker 1: It's exactly like like, Um, I mean, they're all, they're
Speaker 1: all what's but it's he's a lifetime in prison. The
Speaker 1: above what you can't see those two you see those
Speaker 1: two big frame pieces the wall hall drawings, um, you know,
Speaker 1: in preparation to do silk screens. The one on this
Speaker 1: side is of Wilhelmina Ross, who is a drag queen
Speaker 1: who starred in two of my very first place that
Speaker 1: I wrote. We were friends before war Hall discovered her
Speaker 1: and all that. So my collection is stuff like that. So, yes,
Speaker 1: I live in a barn that my office is sort
Speaker 1: of the hay loft, and I designed this place with
Speaker 1: no walls. Um. I basically designed it for one person.
Speaker 1: There are guest rooms on the on the other side
Speaker 1: there's guest rooms my but I can close off my
Speaker 1: bedroom and just have my world and they can be
Speaker 1: in the house. I did that because I sort of
Speaker 1: came to a realization in my life that I'm just
Speaker 1: not good at relationships. I love men, and I love
Speaker 1: playing with men, and I love romance, and I love
Speaker 1: sex and I love the physicality. I just not good
Speaker 1: at relationships. I lose myself completely in a relationship. The
Speaker 1: very first thing I'm willing to do is give myself up.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants a cipher, but that's what I turned myself into.
Speaker 1: I just become like whatever for you. It's stupid, it's bad,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. Um. And so I stopped doing it.
Speaker 1: I stopped doing I had, you know, the book certainly
Speaker 1: numbers mess of my relationships, and I do mean mess um.
Speaker 1: And then there's a lot more. I was actually I was.
Speaker 1: Actually My editor sent to me, so what about the
Speaker 1: next book? What is that gonna be? And I said, well,
Speaker 1: I could write a book about all the boyfriends I
Speaker 1: didn't talk about. I said, I even have a title
Speaker 1: for it, bottomless. Okay, okay, you have so much self knowledge.
Speaker 1: Have you been in therapy? No, but let me say this,
Speaker 1: any gay person has been through therapy. When you're a
Speaker 1: child you're you mostly brought into a family. Most children,
Speaker 1: lucky children are brought into a family. As you learned
Speaker 1: language and really ships and all that, you look and
Speaker 1: see where you belong. Oh, this is what a daddy does,
Speaker 1: This is what a mommy does, This is what a
Speaker 1: brother does. This is and you find yourself in that.
Speaker 1: A gay child goes through that process and goes, uh,
Speaker 1: don't feel that way. I don't feel like that boys
Speaker 1: and feeling or young lesbians. If I don't feel like
Speaker 1: that girl is feeling, I have very difference. So they
Speaker 1: go back and they do the math all over again,
Speaker 1: and they do and they study themselves and they go, Okay,
Speaker 1: I fit here, I fit here, I feel you I
Speaker 1: don't fit there. So that's called the act of coming out.
Speaker 1: Coming out. This is coming out in public, but this
Speaker 1: is coming out to yourself. Every gay child, and I
Speaker 1: would add transgender and questioning has been through self analysis.
Speaker 1: They have to because they've got to figure out what
Speaker 1: the hell they are in this world and how they
Speaker 1: fit in. So most gay kids, transgender kids, whatever, have
Speaker 1: so much more self knowledge than any heterosexual will have
Speaker 1: with twenty you know, than what do you allen have?
Speaker 1: After a hundred and forty years of therapy, because we've
Speaker 1: gone that deep in ourselves. What is it that's making
Speaker 1: me attracted to that person? What do I want? This
Speaker 1: so much going on there? So you ask where do
Speaker 1: you get yourself knowledge? I think I have the same
Speaker 1: self knowledge that many of the gay people do. Okay,
Speaker 1: and uh, but you have so much self knowledge about relationships.
Speaker 1: How you lose yourself with the other person. If but
Speaker 1: I would think the desire does not evaporate. So theoretically,
Speaker 1: if someone or through some process could help you in
Speaker 1: a relationship not to who's yourself. Is it that you're
Speaker 1: seventy years old and you say I don't want to
Speaker 1: change or you don't believe that could happen? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I um this this this. I have a gentleman caller,
Speaker 1: I have don't feel bad for blacks dubois. I have
Speaker 1: a gentleman caller. I don't. I don't live without. I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not a eunuch. Um so I just don't.
Speaker 1: I'm just not looking for at this moment, I have
Speaker 1: never met the person that I could do that with,
Speaker 1: that I could consciously couple with. I haven't met Mike
Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow, who know she consciously on couples, right, she
Speaker 1: doesn't come she got the on couples. But yeah, am
Speaker 1: I open to it? Yeah? And because age has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with it, I'll never forget. There's a lovely
Speaker 1: um documentary about about gay life, and there as this
Speaker 1: older couple that met in their late seventies and they
Speaker 1: sort of looked at each other and said, should we
Speaker 1: see what this is like at our age? You know,
Speaker 1: we had all the sex in our twenties and thirties
Speaker 1: and then the world sort of dropped us. Should we see?
Speaker 1: And they did and they were together until they died. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I am. I am a believer. You know, I
Speaker 1: have friends that that meant. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 1: how armistic marpen I don't know how old he was
Speaker 1: when he met Chris, but but they're such a happy,
Speaker 1: wonderful couple. Um yeah, I believe it can happen. It's
Speaker 1: just do I need it? And the truth is I
Speaker 1: mostly would rather hang out with my friends. You know, okay, boys,
Speaker 1: but boys are different than then boys is so different
Speaker 1: because you know, we we we like it's it's like exciting,
Speaker 1: it's society. It's exciting, we orgasm and then we want pizza.
Speaker 1: S it's boys. Okay, let's go back to the point
Speaker 1: invention earlier about the end of the book, and you're
Speaker 1: connecting with your brother, which really has to do with
Speaker 1: your mother and how she viewed the fact that you
Speaker 1: were gay. And it's quite heavy. So if you could
Speaker 1: relate a little bit of that to my audience and
Speaker 1: how it ultimately left you have accepted or you still scarred,
Speaker 1: and tell us I think what your parents say to you.
Speaker 1: I think Soundheim was so right when he wrote in
Speaker 1: in Into the Woods, children will listen. You know what
Speaker 1: your parents say to you, and how you grow up,
Speaker 1: and the stuff that said to you, whether you're conscious
Speaker 1: of it or not, stays with you and imprints on
Speaker 1: you so heavily that all the therapy in the world
Speaker 1: can't actually erase it. Ud Ronald Tavel, who created the
Speaker 1: Theater of the Ridiculous, I um he was agoraphobic, and
Speaker 1: so I used to have to take him to therapy.
Speaker 1: I just have to pick him up in his apartment
Speaker 1: and take him uptown because you couldn't go uptown on
Speaker 1: his own. And I would sit outside in the in
Speaker 1: the lobby but I could hear when they got loud
Speaker 1: and at what guy Ronald was in the sixties at
Speaker 1: the time, and I'm sitting there reading a magazine or whatever,
Speaker 1: and I hear the therapists scream out, You're six day,
Speaker 1: three fucking years old. Where are you gonna stop blaming
Speaker 1: your mother? You know, it's true, it sticks with you,
Speaker 1: it's important, it's very important, but you gotta also let
Speaker 1: it go. My mother may have had that bad moment,
Speaker 1: and maybe that bad moment was a lot longer because
Speaker 1: obviously was going on in her mind, whatever's going on.
Speaker 1: But my mother went on to deliver meals for for
Speaker 1: um God's love. We deliver, you know, to AIDS patients
Speaker 1: for years. He's a woman in her seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: driving around, she said, bay with her friends delivering meals
Speaker 1: to gay people. Shut in. My mother. She she spoke
Speaker 1: at She didn't like speaking at groups because she said,
Speaker 1: what do I know, I'm no expert. But she spoke
Speaker 1: to parents all the time. People would write to her
Speaker 1: and she would and she would speak to them. She
Speaker 1: supported causes left him right, you know. She had her
Speaker 1: Jewish causes and she and then she had her gay causes.
Speaker 1: So was she still my mother who would make me crazy?
Speaker 1: I'll tell your story that's not in the book, that
Speaker 1: will show you it has nothing to do with sexuality,
Speaker 1: has just to do with with mothers and sons. So
Speaker 1: Lakajha Fall is about to open a revival of lakaj
Speaker 1: at the at the Marquis Theater right across the street,
Speaker 1: the Minskore Theater. I'm about to open in Fiddler on
Speaker 1: the Roof. So I'm rehearsing eight hours a day, killing myself,
Speaker 1: learning those dances, the songs and all that. Across the
Speaker 1: street they're rehearsing Lakasha Fall. I'm Lakasja Vos opening, let's say,
Speaker 1: on Saturday night, and I'm gonna open the next Monday
Speaker 1: in Fiddler. So I rehearse all day. I get a
Speaker 1: room at the at the Marquis Hotel. There's a hotel
Speaker 1: above the theater um, so I can change my clothes.
Speaker 1: My family and friends are all waiting for me up
Speaker 1: in the thing. So I come across. I'm like dying.
Speaker 1: I've been dancing all day. I'm dying. I jump in
Speaker 1: the shower. I pulled on my casino. Okay, let's go
Speaker 1: and As we're walking out the hotel door, my friend
Speaker 1: Patty says to me, you must be exhausted. You work
Speaker 1: so hard. My mother under her breath goes, I should
Speaker 1: work so hard. Ha ha, that is classic Jewish mother.
Speaker 1: Believe me, I understand. I turned around the finger in
Speaker 1: her face and said, Jacqueline, you can go home right now.
Speaker 1: You don't have to go downstairs and take a bow
Speaker 1: as my mother. You don't have to sit through this
Speaker 1: show of mine. You can just go home right now.
Speaker 1: What I say So, that's mothers and sons that had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with sensuality or anything else. I should
Speaker 1: work so hard, Okay, pivoting just a little bit. Both
Speaker 1: you and your brother grew up in the city. Ron's
Speaker 1: office was in the city, You lived in the city.
Speaker 1: You both primarily live in the country. Now what's that about. Well,
Speaker 1: he needed to because he had his two sons, and
Speaker 1: they made a choice, um two of what schools they
Speaker 1: wanted their kids to go to. Because you can you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, these private schools in the city cost a
Speaker 1: fortune and both kids, both of his sons went to
Speaker 1: lovely private schools when they were little, but as they
Speaker 1: got older, they needed better schools so um. And I
Speaker 1: think I think they made that choice for that reason,
Speaker 1: because because my sister in law is a lawyer and
Speaker 1: she still worked in the city to this day, she's
Speaker 1: still um commutes into the city. Uh, so they made
Speaker 1: that choice. I was looking. I was I was living
Speaker 1: in the basement of Harvey to Wells Brownstone, and then
Speaker 1: I and then I, uh, I moved into a a condo.
Speaker 1: He needed to move his mother into the basement. So
Speaker 1: I found a condo and I moved into this condo.
Speaker 1: But I was looking for a place in Manhattan, and
Speaker 1: the places were so expensive in Manhattan. Brooklyn used to
Speaker 1: be cheap. Can you believe Brooklyn used to be cheap?
Speaker 1: It certainly ain't cheap now my apart. I just looked
Speaker 1: at my apartment, my old apartment, which I think I
Speaker 1: sold for two hundred thousand dollars, is worth it like
Speaker 1: a million and a half. Now. Anyway, I'm looking in
Speaker 1: the city, and there was there was one building that
Speaker 1: I really loved. It was a little standalone building in
Speaker 1: Greenwich Muse you know, one of those little streets in
Speaker 1: Grenwed Village. But it really it literally was one room
Speaker 1: on four stories. There was on the first story was
Speaker 1: like a living room, the second story was the kitchen
Speaker 1: in the bathroom, the ne story was was the bedroom,
Speaker 1: and then the top was like the office. And that
Speaker 1: that was a million dollars. And friends said, really, why
Speaker 1: don't you just stay in your apartment in Brooklyn, take
Speaker 1: that money, nowhere near that money, and go buy a
Speaker 1: country house. I said, what am I good guy from Brooklyn?
Speaker 1: What am I gonna do with the country house? And
Speaker 1: she said, because you love swimming, you love there, you know,
Speaker 1: just go and see what that's like, because I did.
Speaker 1: Used to come up to this town I live in.
Speaker 1: I live in a small fictional town in Connecticut, and
Speaker 1: I used to come up to this town because I
Speaker 1: had friends who lived here and um, they had a pool,
Speaker 1: you know, and I love swimming. I love being out
Speaker 1: in the cut. I mean, a lot of our childhood
Speaker 1: was spent in the Catskills because that's where my father
Speaker 1: was from, so I guess it was already in the blood.
Speaker 1: So I got this weekend place and fell in love
Speaker 1: and spent less and less time in the city. And
Speaker 1: also when you have animals, it makes it harder to
Speaker 1: move back and forth, you know. It's like I have
Speaker 1: two dogs and two cats. So I filled the car
Speaker 1: with the two carrying cases for the cats, and I
Speaker 1: put the dogs in the car, and then I drive
Speaker 1: into the city park in a garage. Take out the dogs,
Speaker 1: take out the cats, take them up to the apartment,
Speaker 1: put out the water, put out the food, change the
Speaker 1: litter box, take the dogs down for a walk, bring
Speaker 1: the dogs backed up. Then you were first free to
Speaker 1: go out. You went out, come back to the apartment,
Speaker 1: got the dogs, got the cats backed downstairs, into the car,
Speaker 1: and drive home. What kind of you know, It was
Speaker 1: just silly. So that's how I ended up spending more
Speaker 1: time here. Okay, there's a pulse in the city, and
Speaker 1: you certainly drew on that pulse, both for daily activities
Speaker 1: and inspiration. Do you I'll grow that? Is it an
Speaker 1: age thing or is the city or is the city
Speaker 1: just different? The city has definitely changed, and maybe it's
Speaker 1: and maybe it has changed cost of age or whatever.
Speaker 1: But the so much of what I loved has changed. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, there's the gay bars, just people are openly
Speaker 1: ky now. It's it's a different vibe to all that
Speaker 1: Broadway is. When I arrived on Broadway, more than half
Speaker 1: the theaters were empty. My friend Betty Lee, who had
Speaker 1: the house up here that that um that I used
Speaker 1: to come up to, she was the one who came
Speaker 1: up with the idea instead of having all those empty theaters,
Speaker 1: to put up a sign that said see a Broadway
Speaker 1: show just for the fun of it. Half the theaters
Speaker 1: in New York said see a Broadway show for the
Speaker 1: fun of it. They were empty. Broadway was different. The
Speaker 1: the shows on Broadway were four New Yorkers. Think about it.
Speaker 1: You know they didn't have of a Phantom of the
Speaker 1: operand and Lion King and Aladdin and Alan Mankin lives
Speaker 1: over there. Don't tell him. I said that. Um, they
Speaker 1: didn't have these tourists kind of shows. It was we
Speaker 1: had on on my block alone, where I had Towards Song.
Speaker 1: We had Night Mother plenty, um, Um good Kay two,
Speaker 1: um Amadeus. We had plays that were four New Yorkers.
Speaker 1: We had musicals you know that there was a revival
Speaker 1: of of Pirates of pens And starring Linda Roundstadt. There
Speaker 1: was Barnum. We had trying to think we had the
Speaker 1: history of rock and roll. They were different. It was different.
Speaker 1: Not that one's better than the Broadway goes through it's things.
Speaker 1: It's going through a thing right now, It's it is different.
Speaker 1: Can I go into the city and get enough of
Speaker 1: a flavor from spending a day in the city. Here.
Speaker 1: I go in, I go to the art galleries. I
Speaker 1: go to an auction I go to the auction houses.
Speaker 1: I come in, I see a Broadway show. I heeded
Speaker 1: my favorite restaurants. I see my my friends and all that,
Speaker 1: and then I come home. I don't care. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I told Barbara Corkran. You know who Barbara Cowkran is.
Speaker 1: The big she wouldn't send to me. I was playing um.
Speaker 1: I was playing a real estate agent, and she was
Speaker 1: my coach, and she said, Harvey, how could you live
Speaker 1: in Connecticut like that? What's wrong with you? Come back
Speaker 1: to the city. I'll find you an apartment. I said, Barbara,
Speaker 1: here's the difference. I live in the city. I have
Speaker 1: my friendly, my friends and all that. I go up
Speaker 1: to my apartment. I get there, I unlocked the twelve locks.
Speaker 1: I go inside. I closed the twelve locks. The city
Speaker 1: is right outside my door. It's right outside my window,
Speaker 1: it's right outside my door. I am always aware that
Speaker 1: I'm locked in my box and the city's right outside.
Speaker 1: I come home to Connecticut, I get out of my car.
Speaker 1: I walked straight through the house and throw myself in
Speaker 1: the pool, you know, under the stars. Float around in
Speaker 1: the pool for a while, come out, walk around to
Speaker 1: I don't lock the door now I do, but back
Speaker 1: in those days you didn't. Um. I never feel that
Speaker 1: something is outside my door waiting to come in. I'm
Speaker 1: in a peaceful place. It's a big difference. How does
Speaker 1: it affect inspiration creatively that you never know? You know,
Speaker 1: if you if you don't meet John Doe, you're not
Speaker 1: going to write about John Doe. So I wouldn't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, since I've been living here, I've written I
Speaker 1: don't know how many things I've written so many. Um,
Speaker 1: it's probably easier to write up here because this office
Speaker 1: is very comfortable and uh, you don't have that hocking
Speaker 1: at you from outside. You don't have that fever coming
Speaker 1: at you. I can concentrate. I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: do you have to live to write here? But I live? Um? Okay.
Speaker 1: You are a very charismatic personality. You tell a good story.
Speaker 1: You take up a lot of space. Were you that
Speaker 1: way from a very young age or is this something
Speaker 1: that you developed grew into. When I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I always had a friend that was more powerful than me.
Speaker 1: I was always the second banana. I was always the
Speaker 1: best friend. Like my friend Michael was very charismatic and
Speaker 1: very handsome, and I could get any guy he wanted
Speaker 1: and all that, and there was me and I had
Speaker 1: several of those relationships, and I liked being second banana. Um.
Speaker 1: I didn't feel ever that I wanted to be out there.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until the until I got into the theater
Speaker 1: and I got that taste of doing stuff. And I
Speaker 1: guess what. The way I described it in the book
Speaker 1: was what Tom O'Horgan said to me. Tom o horgan,
Speaker 1: who directed Hair, and I said, Tom, I've run out
Speaker 1: of unemployment. I have no work. You're doing a new
Speaker 1: show at the Public Theater. Please give me a role
Speaker 1: in the show. And he said, there's nothing in the
Speaker 1: show for you. I said, put me in the chorus.
Speaker 1: I just need a job. And he said, Harvey, if
Speaker 1: I put you in the chorus, I have no chorus.
Speaker 1: And that's when I started realizing there was something else
Speaker 1: going on with me that I didn't wasn't really in
Speaker 1: control of what happens between you and the audience. The
Speaker 1: real magic is not something you do, it's it just happens.
Speaker 1: It happens because of who you are, or your personality
Speaker 1: or whatever. That magic is that you can't really put
Speaker 1: your finger on, you know. Ah, I can't tell you
Speaker 1: why audiences loved me anymore than I can tell you,
Speaker 1: you know, some of the mystery. I no, I don't
Speaker 1: think I'm a great actor. I don't think obviously not
Speaker 1: a great singer, dancer, any of that stuff. But there's
Speaker 1: something that people like about seeing me, so it's nice.
Speaker 1: I don't mind. I don't mind it all forgetting about
Speaker 1: the critics and the people we referenced earlier who might
Speaker 1: say negative things. You're very successful. Do you find any
Speaker 1: insider resentment of your success? There's that line in the
Speaker 1: book that I think, I forget who said it. I
Speaker 1: think it was Jay Well anyway, uh, And it's a
Speaker 1: he's and it wasn't an original line of his, that
Speaker 1: show business is the only business where it's not enough
Speaker 1: that you succeed all of your friends and my fail um.
Speaker 1: I don't think that we in the theater are the
Speaker 1: only ones who feel that way. And I do certainly
Speaker 1: understand that there are people who feel that way. The
Speaker 1: older I get, the less I feel that I'm in
Speaker 1: somehow in competition. I hate that we have award shows
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. I loathe it. Um. Now, what
Speaker 1: somebody can sid to me is that's fine. You have
Speaker 1: six Tony Awards sitting in your bathroom, you know, so
Speaker 1: you can say you don't like the Tony's. But I
Speaker 1: don't like what it does to us. It's a tool
Speaker 1: to sell tickets, That's what it is. Can't we be
Speaker 1: honest about that, um and not turn it into something else?
Speaker 1: These popularity contests. But but I guess you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: they give out awards in second grade, so I guess
Speaker 1: that's just built into human I don't know. Okay, Emotionally,
Speaker 1: not on paper, do you feel that you're this big success?
Speaker 1: Emotionally do I feel like I'm a success? Not on paper?
Speaker 1: I mean, you someone could say, Harvey, here's the list
Speaker 1: of your Tony Awards, here's the list of this, this
Speaker 1: is your bank account that define success. But that might
Speaker 1: be completely different from what you feel on the inside. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I definitely feel because I don't feel. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: certain certainly things I didn't do. You know, we all
Speaker 1: have little moments of like being conscious of a project
Speaker 1: we didn't do that we should have done, or you
Speaker 1: know that kind of stuff for something I wish I
Speaker 1: had gotten. Um, but that doesn't have anything to do
Speaker 1: with success. Yeah. No, I would have to say yes,
Speaker 1: is that a good There's nothing I'd have to say
Speaker 1: that that. I'm really very happy with what I've accomplished. Um.
Speaker 1: Like I said, to sit down and write something, um,
Speaker 1: you know, like whether it's this book. You know that,
Speaker 1: I mean a New York Times best seller, goddamn. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, really as long as as long as you
Speaker 1: can believe it. A lot of people can't accept it
Speaker 1: even though they've achieved it. Yeah. No, I don't think
Speaker 1: anything came to me so easily that I can't accept it.
Speaker 1: I've worked really hard on most things. You know. Sometimes
Speaker 1: sometimes something happens that that I just say, oh please. Um.
Speaker 1: There's this movie that's opening Friday, your Friday, called Bros.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've seen the ads for it,
Speaker 1: Billy Listener else. Yeah. So I'm in the movie for
Speaker 1: about thirty seconds, literally thirty seconds. I hear from everyone
Speaker 1: who's seen it from every screening they've had, including from
Speaker 1: Billy Eichner, that as soon as the audience hears my voice,
Speaker 1: they begin to applaud. They get so excited that I'm there. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: by the time they stopped a book over because I'm
Speaker 1: on the screen for thirty seconds. Now, would you say,
Speaker 1: that's sort of embarrassing, you know, because you didn't really
Speaker 1: do anything to get that kind of applause, But it's
Speaker 1: also cute and fun and well you did plenty, Well
Speaker 1: I guess, I guess in the long run, I did.
Speaker 1: I took a lot of cocks to get that reputation.
Speaker 1: So you talk in the book, but I'll tell you
Speaker 1: a story. There's a new woman that writes page six,
Speaker 1: you know, page sixth of course, So it's the opening
Speaker 1: night of Funny Girl, and we're all nervous enough as
Speaker 1: it is. This is the Funny Girl that's on now
Speaker 1: that now starts. Liam Michellen is a huge hit. But
Speaker 1: you may remember several months ago we opened with Beanie Feldstein, Feldman,
Speaker 1: Feldspine whatever, and everybody was a little nervous. So it
Speaker 1: was opening night of that and the woman from page
Speaker 1: six is there, and they say, Harvey stay away from her.
Speaker 1: She's so mean. She she writes very mean things. Just
Speaker 1: stay away from I said, what the funk do I care?
Speaker 1: So I go up to I said, what do you want?
Speaker 1: She said? The way the world is going now, with
Speaker 1: people changing language and all that, I don't even know
Speaker 1: what to call you. Are you a homosexual? Are you
Speaker 1: a faggot? Are you are are you gay? Are you queer?
Speaker 1: And I said, just call me a cocksucker? That one
Speaker 1: ever can't respond to that particular one. At what point
Speaker 1: is some people now you talking about being gay, knowing
Speaker 1: that you're different referenced earlier than the conventional person. At
Speaker 1: what point did you wait a second? I can't let
Speaker 1: you get away with conventional person. I can't let you
Speaker 1: get away with saying that gays are conventional people. You're
Speaker 1: absolutely right boring any heterosexual. I know some gaze. I
Speaker 1: know some gaze i'd like to throw back. You know
Speaker 1: you measure them and you they're not big enough to
Speaker 1: keeping your thrown back in the ocean. I know some
Speaker 1: really conventional gaze. You can't get away with that with me,
Speaker 1: and you are absolutely correct. If I want to give
Speaker 1: myself an excuse, I was talking while I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: something else, So let me go directly what I was thinking.
Speaker 1: Did you know from a very young age you wanted
Speaker 1: to we're going to be something? Because in the book
Speaker 1: you portray someone who's not who's smart but as dyslexic.
Speaker 1: Some of your parents are not absolutely behind you. A
Speaker 1: lot of people who are someone ostracized too strong a term,
Speaker 1: but people who are living in a separate This is
Speaker 1: where I, you know, used conventional but and I won't
Speaker 1: use it again, who are separate from the traditional. Um
Speaker 1: they say I'm different, but I'm gonna make it. Other
Speaker 1: people say, well, I'm just gonna go on my own course.
Speaker 1: Who knows what's happening? What do you know? I had
Speaker 1: no My mother had dropped out of school in seventh
Speaker 1: grade because you had to help, uh, support the family.
Speaker 1: My father has brought up in a orphanage in the Catskills,
Speaker 1: where at thirteen you were an adult. So at thirteen
Speaker 1: he was driving a truck for the bakery. He was
Speaker 1: delivering bread for the local bakery. My father worked his
Speaker 1: whole life in a factory as a mana here. I
Speaker 1: was not raised to be Uh why not? I would,
Speaker 1: but I was not raised to be in the uppercrost Um.
Speaker 1: My brother and I were called the lawyer and the
Speaker 1: doctor because we would choose. You know, I choose always,
Speaker 1: that's what you what you? I watched my mother. You know,
Speaker 1: I didn't know what the hell I wanted to be.
Speaker 1: I knew I wanted to be some kind of an artist.
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I love the arts. I love Disney.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be a Disney cartoonist. But I knew
Speaker 1: I wasn't good enough to be a Disney cartoonist. I
Speaker 1: was good enough to copy a Disney cartoon. I could
Speaker 1: copy the drawing, but could I create. No. But I
Speaker 1: knew that there must be jobs in the arts for
Speaker 1: for a technician type person. So that's what I figured
Speaker 1: I would do. So I went ahead and got my
Speaker 1: education as an art in the arts. I went to
Speaker 1: the High School of Art and Design. I went to
Speaker 1: Pratt got my degree in painting, et cetera. My mother,
Speaker 1: when I went to high school, went back to high
Speaker 1: school with me so she could finish high school. She
Speaker 1: then went to college with me. My older brother was
Speaker 1: already ahead of us, and my father sort of put up.
Speaker 1: It wasn't all that happy with it, but he put
Speaker 1: up with her going back to school, and she went,
Speaker 1: and she got as far she got her master's. She
Speaker 1: went as far as she could have gotten a doctor.
Speaker 1: But she didn't want to write that long paper because
Speaker 1: she was already at the top of the food chain
Speaker 1: as a New York City school teacher. She said, why
Speaker 1: do you all that work and not get anything for it? Anyway?
Speaker 1: So I watched people take care of business which had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with rising above in the way that
Speaker 1: you were asking. I my brother, as you probably know
Speaker 1: because you know him, he got out of school. He
Speaker 1: was supposed to be the doctor he found himself from
Speaker 1: pre med before he realized that he had been talked
Speaker 1: into it. I never wanted to be a doctor. He
Speaker 1: went and formed a rock and roll band. They didn't
Speaker 1: do very well, but they did okay enough so that
Speaker 1: he realized he could go back to law school because
Speaker 1: with a law degree there were lots of things he
Speaker 1: could do. He could understand contracts and all that and
Speaker 1: become a manager or whatever and then have the career
Speaker 1: that he had. I, on the other hand, just went
Speaker 1: forward with whatever opportunities came to me. Somebody said, draw posters.
Speaker 1: I drew posters. Somebody said, work on a set for
Speaker 1: a show. I worked on the set, pull the curtain,
Speaker 1: do the lights at this little role. What the hell?
Speaker 1: When Ronald Tavell said to me, why don't you write
Speaker 1: a play, and I said, I can't because I'm dyslexic.
Speaker 1: I can't spell. And he said to me, there are
Speaker 1: people who get paid two dollars an hour to fix
Speaker 1: your spelling. You go ahead and write. That was the
Speaker 1: freedom for me. So it wasn't that I had this ambition,
Speaker 1: this growing ambition that I wanted to now be a writer.
Speaker 1: I'm going to write Broadway plays. No, it was just
Speaker 1: an opportunity to do something else, and and I didn't
Speaker 1: know what I was doing. And the first couple of
Speaker 1: plays I wrote, as I say in the book, were
Speaker 1: imitations of my friends plays um which is another reason
Speaker 1: why I don't like critics, because they came in and
Speaker 1: reviewed it as if I was trying to do something else,
Speaker 1: you know, like, look what he's doing. He's imitating his friends.
Speaker 1: Such a rip off, That's all I was trying to
Speaker 1: I never wrote before, I never typed before. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so my life was in a funny way accidental. Did
Speaker 1: I have points where all of a sudden, I pushed, yes, definitely,
Speaker 1: you have to you know, you can't just swim with
Speaker 1: the tide all the time. So I did have moments,
Speaker 1: but for the most part it was with open eyes, saying,
Speaker 1: what's this next opportunity? Okay, I mean I just how
Speaker 1: many years ago? Let me just look at the script.
Speaker 1: Two thousand and twelve, they came to me to write
Speaker 1: a movie about May West for Bette Midler. I went
Speaker 1: through all the steps and all that. I'm sitting here
Speaker 1: with this open because yesterday, nine years later, ten years later, yes, say,
Speaker 1: I got a call from somebody who had heard about
Speaker 1: my script from Me West. They never made it um
Speaker 1: and said I hear it's good. Can I see it?
Speaker 1: Somebody would say, hey, Harvey's out there trying to sell
Speaker 1: the script from Me West. No, it's just one of
Speaker 1: them accidents. Life. Life is really interesting. Life is really
Speaker 1: interesting if you just live it, you just you know.
Speaker 1: I think the quote in the book is life is
Speaker 1: only as exciting as the number of times you say yes, right,
Speaker 1: I was just going to get there. So you say
Speaker 1: say yes, because you never know what will happen if
Speaker 1: you say no. Nothing's going to happen. Is it really
Speaker 1: saying yes to everything? Or now I see you shaking
Speaker 1: your head. So what does that ultimately mean? Is it
Speaker 1: when you're on the fence, you say yes? Because there
Speaker 1: are certain things when you're dying into when you get
Speaker 1: the offer and there so what we're talking on the
Speaker 1: certain that you say no way, But how does this
Speaker 1: actually operate in your life where you say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I could stay where I am, but I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: a flyer. Um, if you're dying to do something, there's
Speaker 1: not really a question, then you're gonna do it. That's
Speaker 1: if you have. You know. I've come up with some
Speaker 1: rules over the years. I'm not sure any of them applied.
Speaker 1: I no longer will do anything for money. Um. Money
Speaker 1: is the wrong reason to say yes. And I only
Speaker 1: know that because I've said yes to things for money
Speaker 1: and they've always turned out disastrously. Um. The ones that
Speaker 1: are the things that that I was talking about, and
Speaker 1: the things that people don't pay attention to are not
Speaker 1: necessarily Somebody calls you up and says you ought to
Speaker 1: be in fither on the roof, that's a whole different thing.
Speaker 1: Somebody calls you up and says you want to go
Speaker 1: out to dinner. That dinner can change your life more
Speaker 1: than being in fither on the roof. You don't know.
Speaker 1: You don't know what will happen at that dinner unless
Speaker 1: you go to that dinner. It's the little stuff that
Speaker 1: we say no to, and we say no because it's uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: not because it's a big life changing thing, A big
Speaker 1: life changing thing you have to think about. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about I'm sitting here talking to you and I get
Speaker 1: a text message that says, meet me for dinner tonight. No,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say no because I've got the script I
Speaker 1: have to edit, and I have this other stuff and
Speaker 1: I haven't answered email all day and all that, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say no. But if I said yes and
Speaker 1: I went out to that restaurant, I don't know that
Speaker 1: the guy sitting at the next table wouldn't turn out
Speaker 1: to be the great love of my life by angor
Speaker 1: meet him sitting there editing a script at home. So
Speaker 1: it's the little stuff that is really the important stuff
Speaker 1: to say, Yester. If you stay at home, if you
Speaker 1: do the comfortable thing, you will be comfortable, which means
Speaker 1: not living you. You have to you have to live,
Speaker 1: and live means making uncomfortable choices. It's not the big stuff.
Speaker 1: The big stuff you figure out. Okay, I'm interested. You're
Speaker 1: saying that you were busy right now the friend invited
Speaker 1: you to go to dinner, forget the person who sitting
Speaker 1: at home watching television. Whatever. You have things and that
Speaker 1: are going that you're focused on. Just to be clear,
Speaker 1: you are not going to go. And when should you say?
Speaker 1: I'm I got something going on literally just today, the
Speaker 1: same thing. I'm really busy And I say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe at this time I can make a window, but
Speaker 1: I got so much in the schedule. Should I always
Speaker 1: be leaning towards yes? Or when can I just say no?
Speaker 1: When there's other people dependent on you to finish a project,
Speaker 1: you owe that. You owe that um a commitment. If
Speaker 1: it's a project you just want to get finished to
Speaker 1: get it off your desk, you don't necessarily owe that.
Speaker 1: You can say to yourself, as I would if somebody
Speaker 1: calls texting me right now, I would say, you know,
Speaker 1: it's four o'clock. I'm gonna have to stop for dinner
Speaker 1: sooner or later. Anyway, I haven't even had breakfast. I
Speaker 1: didn't even have lunch because I've been running. I came
Speaker 1: running home to do this with you. But I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to stop for dinner anyway. That it's gonna take
Speaker 1: me longer to cook it myself than it will to
Speaker 1: just get in the car and go meet there at
Speaker 1: the diner. Let me go to the diner. That's what
Speaker 1: I mean. Okay. Is it harder to go to the dinner, yes,
Speaker 1: is there It's harder to go to the desk, make
Speaker 1: a sandwich and sit at my desk. Okay, let's go back.
Speaker 1: You say you have this May West script from almost
Speaker 1: a ten years ago. Right, are you the type of
Speaker 1: person right now there's fifteen thing. Well, there's some things
Speaker 1: that are relatively dormant, like that movie script. But are
Speaker 1: there a lot of dormant things or a lot of
Speaker 1: things in the middle? How many projects are you juggling
Speaker 1: or involved in it? Once? Um, I keep joking that
Speaker 1: I'm retired and I cannot stop with the project. So
Speaker 1: at the moment, like I said, this the May West thing,
Speaker 1: this will only take me two days to just I
Speaker 1: just have to clean it up because it's not even
Speaker 1: written on the same UM version of the Scriptwriting Program anymore.
Speaker 1: I just have to go clean it up everything. It'll
Speaker 1: take me two days to do that, no problem, and
Speaker 1: then that's gone. If they come back to me, it's fine,
Speaker 1: but it's nothing I'm gonna actively pursue. But I've got
Speaker 1: a play that I've always wanted to write that I've
Speaker 1: started to write. I've got a television show that I've
Speaker 1: been pitching and I have meetings for and I've had
Speaker 1: a few great meetings, and that's fine. I've got Kinky
Speaker 1: Boots off Broadway, which I still have to do press for.
Speaker 1: I've got Funny Girl on Broadway, which is going just fine. Now.
Speaker 1: Kinky Boots is gonna be on the Today's Show in
Speaker 1: two weeks and they need a lot. You can't say
Speaker 1: a certain word on television. I have to go rewrite
Speaker 1: the line. And then there's another line that's we're seven
Speaker 1: seconds over, and we can't be seven seconds over, so
Speaker 1: I have to cut seven seconds out. So there's always
Speaker 1: stuff like that that has to be done. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's it's And I am offered a
Speaker 1: lot of work that I just say no to because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stupid ideas out there, a lot
Speaker 1: of really bad ideas out there. And the other thing
Speaker 1: that I say no to is when somebody writes to
Speaker 1: me and says, I've always wanted to tell my story
Speaker 1: and you're the one to do it. Oh see, look
Speaker 1: at you nodding your head. I hear that all the time.
Speaker 1: And what do you say to them? I say two things.
Speaker 1: I say, Well, if I was going to write anybody's story,
Speaker 1: take that time, I would write my own. And I
Speaker 1: would say, I just don't have the time. Sounds like
Speaker 1: a great idea, I just don't have the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm a little kind to that. You. What I
Speaker 1: say to them is, if someone's going to tell you
Speaker 1: a story, it should be you. But they always see
Speaker 1: your story, right, but they always say no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you're such a better writing That's that's what I say.
Speaker 1: Somebody's gonna tell you a story, it should be you.
Speaker 1: You have a great idea for a play, go ahead
Speaker 1: and write it. You have a great idea from you
Speaker 1: of the gig, because a day I have more than
Speaker 1: enough ideas of my own. And you know which doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that a bad a good idea could come. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have written Kinky Boots unless I was guilty because
Speaker 1: I had already turned down two or three other shows
Speaker 1: offered to me by the same people, and I said,
Speaker 1: if I turned them down again, And and the produce,
Speaker 1: the main producer had produced my show Catered Affair, which
Speaker 1: she lost everything on it. It bombed. So I owed her,
Speaker 1: and I owed the director choreographer. So I did Kinky Boots,
Speaker 1: which turned out to be a wonderful experience. But it
Speaker 1: took me five or six years to write that show
Speaker 1: to get that score. Well, first of all, to find
Speaker 1: the right composer, which turned out to be Cindy Lauper,
Speaker 1: and then to get the fucking score out of that
Speaker 1: woman had to keep the producers from firing her a
Speaker 1: daily basis. They wanted to fire every single day. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, so it us how it worked. But okay,
Speaker 1: do you have that holy Gray grayal personal project that
Speaker 1: you just need to get done before you leave this
Speaker 1: mortal coil? Oh? I would have done it alround, do
Speaker 1: it all that? I mean, like, like I really want
Speaker 1: to write display. Will the world be fine without Display? Yeah? Will?
Speaker 1: I'd be fine without Display? Here. I'm not a believer
Speaker 1: in life after death. I've been dead, you know. When
Speaker 1: I had my my heart surgery. I've been dead. There's
Speaker 1: no life after death, so I don't worry about what
Speaker 1: I'm going to leave behind, or what somebody's gonna think
Speaker 1: of me or or whatever. It's such silliness. Other projects
Speaker 1: I wish there's there's things I wish I had done
Speaker 1: that I did. I'm doing here. But but but none
Speaker 1: of them are painful because I do enough of what
Speaker 1: I want to do, so none of it's painful. They
Speaker 1: just did the movie of of Little Mermaid. Would I
Speaker 1: have loved to have played Ursula the evil Witch? I
Speaker 1: would have loved it, But Rob wanted Melissa McCarthy. I
Speaker 1: happen to be a huge fan of Melissa McCarthy, So
Speaker 1: while I curse her, I will also applaud her because
Speaker 1: I'm sure she's going to do a fabulous job in
Speaker 1: the role. Okay, your father died surprisingly at a very
Speaker 1: young age. How did that affect you on a long
Speaker 1: term basis? And did it force you to pay closer
Speaker 1: attention to your health? You ultimately had hard problems? Were
Speaker 1: you lucky it was quarter? Would you've been paying attention? Well?
Speaker 1: My heart, then, as I tell the story in the book,
Speaker 1: is such a joke because two days before I went
Speaker 1: to the doctor, before my annual physical, I did a
Speaker 1: drag show for Broadway Cares that when he fights eighth
Speaker 1: and I had this huge fur coat and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: I had these bags that must wait sixty seventy pounds,
Speaker 1: and I dragged them up three flights of stairs to
Speaker 1: the dressing room. Did this show, you know, running up
Speaker 1: and downstairs and all that. I then go to the
Speaker 1: doctor and he said, your heart's about to fail the
Speaker 1: valve um. Don't lift anything over five pounds that don't
Speaker 1: run up and downstairs. I said, you don't. Und day, Well,
Speaker 1: don't do that again, but dude down let me okay.
Speaker 1: Um So some mortality came to me in such a
Speaker 1: strange way. And then I have this brother who immediately
Speaker 1: took charge as he's wont to do, and and and
Speaker 1: because he was pre men in college, he had a
Speaker 1: doctor friend who was able to hook me up with
Speaker 1: the number one cardiologist in New York. And so before
Speaker 1: I knew it, I was being operated. It wasn't even
Speaker 1: like a choice. Um. So did I ever stop to
Speaker 1: think that my father died of a heart attack? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I'm not gonna say that life isn't precious. Life
Speaker 1: is precious. But do I think I'm gonna be cheated
Speaker 1: out of something if I died this evening. No, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't want them to find me naked. But no, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't feel like I was cheated. I've had this incredible life. Um,
Speaker 1: if it ends tonight, they're fast. If it ends thirty
Speaker 1: years from now, well not really. I have I have
Speaker 1: a pact with a friend of mine that when things
Speaker 1: get too hard, we take each other up to the
Speaker 1: roof and look at the view. Hey. Look, people couldn't
Speaker 1: see the push there on screen, exactly just right off
Speaker 1: the roof. But um, yeah, but we don't live in Russia.
Speaker 1: We don't have putin as our dear friend hel pushes
Speaker 1: off the roof. Uh. But yeah, you know. My philosophy
Speaker 1: of life, I guess this is a little different than
Speaker 1: other people's. And partly because I have my beliefs, and
Speaker 1: then partly because I've had this in I mean, what
Speaker 1: the fucking ride I've had already? Do I have more
Speaker 1: fun stuff to do? Absolutely? Every day I have more
Speaker 1: fun stuff to do. But I enjoy You're talking about
Speaker 1: somebody who enjoys being at home alone. With my dog
Speaker 1: as much as I do go into a Broadway theater.
Speaker 1: I love them both, but I love them both and
Speaker 1: I get something out of both. I love seeing my
Speaker 1: friends in the city. Hell, I love seeing my friends
Speaker 1: up here, which is the whole different crowd of people. Um,
Speaker 1: and then they sort of don't mix my life, don't mix.
Speaker 1: Or city city at my sewing machine and making a
Speaker 1: quilt or sitting at this computer writing a play. Okay,
Speaker 1: to what degree does Harvey Firestein both open doors and
Speaker 1: get what he wants? Or do you have to because
Speaker 1: projects can be so expensive? Do you always have to
Speaker 1: sell a projects are very sense and you always have
Speaker 1: to sell even if you want to do it in
Speaker 1: a tiny theater um, because because it's always It's my
Speaker 1: friend Martin Sherman who wrote Bent. You probably know his played,
Speaker 1: So he wrote a play that I did at the
Speaker 1: public theater Um called Gently Down the Stream. I did
Speaker 1: it about five years ago, and uh and we we
Speaker 1: had to work to find a theater to put it on.
Speaker 1: We absolutely did and you have so you have the
Speaker 1: writer of Bent and me and uh Sean Matthias directed
Speaker 1: and he's very well known English director. We had three
Speaker 1: very three people that you can trust to put on
Speaker 1: a good show, and we still had to work really
Speaker 1: hard to find the right theater. Um, it's just it's
Speaker 1: just just the way it is. I have projects all,
Speaker 1: you know, like Bella Bella. I did a reading of it.
Speaker 1: I must have had around ten twelve theaters come and
Speaker 1: everybody had different opinions on what should be done with it. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're always selling, but that has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: writing it. I already wrote the show. Then you then
Speaker 1: you have to sell, and then you go back to
Speaker 1: being an artist again of producing it. Okay, so when
Speaker 1: you do go to sell, up, most of the creative
Speaker 1: work has already done in terms of, you know, the
Speaker 1: structure of the bones of what you got. No, your
Speaker 1: script is done, you're you know in the script is malleable.
Speaker 1: But theater is a theater is Uh, it's not a
Speaker 1: single person. Even even if you're doing a one person
Speaker 1: show like Bella Bella, you have the director, you have
Speaker 1: the designers, lighting, sounds, set designer, even costume of what
Speaker 1: you're gonna look like. Um, you have the theater owner
Speaker 1: and what that space is going to feel like when
Speaker 1: the audience comes into it. Do I I don't know
Speaker 1: if I tell the story in the book or not.
Speaker 1: When we were doing Bella Bella and this guy had
Speaker 1: to go to the bathroom so bad, but he did
Speaker 1: not want to leave that theater. He didn't want to
Speaker 1: leave that theater. So he went out the side door
Speaker 1: and he peted on the wall. What he didn't know
Speaker 1: was we get here and in the theater he peed
Speaker 1: on the wall of the theater and they were very
Speaker 1: thin walls, and of the entire audience. And the play
Speaker 1: takes place in a bathroom, so I was grateful that
Speaker 1: he didn't come up on stage and pee in the
Speaker 1: toilet boat on stage. But the guy, I mean, so
Speaker 1: even the theater can fit into what the whole evening
Speaker 1: is like. Um, but yes, theater is definitely it's not
Speaker 1: it's not a book. Even the book. I mean, Chip
Speaker 1: Read did a gorgeous job designing this book. You know,
Speaker 1: the coverage is absolutely beautiful. I mean took us weeks
Speaker 1: just choosing the photographs because my editor didn't want it
Speaker 1: to look like a showbiz book. You know, I would
Speaker 1: have put a couple of hundred photographs in there, but
Speaker 1: he didn't want it to look like a showbis book
Speaker 1: he wanted to look like a memoir. So you don't
Speaker 1: do anything alone. There's no such thing. I mean, while
Speaker 1: you and I sit here talking, you have Margaret sitting
Speaker 1: in the other room, you know, boared out of my mind,
Speaker 1: saying I gotta fix this ship. When this is over,
Speaker 1: nobody nobody's alone. That's well put. You've made your name
Speaker 1: on Broadway, but you've also had great success in films.
Speaker 1: Give me your take, Hollywood visa the Broadway, and you
Speaker 1: wish you were in more films which tend to have
Speaker 1: a permanence that Broadway does not. What's your take? Um,
Speaker 1: I couldn't care less about movies. I really couldn't. I've
Speaker 1: been in a few, not many. I've enjoyed myself. Sometimes
Speaker 1: most of the time I'm bored because movies, you know,
Speaker 1: they drag you to the set, you rehearse the scene.
Speaker 1: Then you go back to your trailer and you're sit
Speaker 1: in your trailer for several hours while they lighted or whatever,
Speaker 1: and they put you in the costume whatever. They drag
Speaker 1: you back to the set, they fix it again. You
Speaker 1: do it once or twice, so twenty thirty times doesn't
Speaker 1: even matter. You're out there for a couple of minutes
Speaker 1: back to your trailer. It's it's not There are people
Speaker 1: that know how to do that as an art I
Speaker 1: am not among them. I find it incredibly boring. Theater.
Speaker 1: You still rehearse like you do in movies, but you
Speaker 1: rehearse the whole piece, you form the whole piece, and
Speaker 1: then you go out and you perform it in front
Speaker 1: of an audience and you have the whole control. You
Speaker 1: are the control, You're the act just telling the audience
Speaker 1: what to look at well, um, what to feel at all.
Speaker 1: It's just much more control in that. Um. I love movies.
Speaker 1: I love going to the movies. I love watching movies,
Speaker 1: and I could care less about being in them. I
Speaker 1: loved doing certain movies. But if you knew what those
Speaker 1: circumstances really were, like, they're a joke. I mean, Mrs
Speaker 1: s doabtfire, you know which? Everybody recognized me from I
Speaker 1: was there two days. There was two days that I
Speaker 1: got a lifetime relationship out of it is the important
Speaker 1: thing to me. I couldn't care less about the movie.
Speaker 1: My relationship with Robin meant everything to me. Um, what's
Speaker 1: another one independence day there? One day I did the
Speaker 1: scenes with you know, in my in my offices or whatever.
Speaker 1: And then they took me outside, put me in a
Speaker 1: car in an alley, said we're gonna turn on a
Speaker 1: yellow light. When the yellow light goes on, that means
Speaker 1: the building is falling on you. Make a face. I
Speaker 1: made a face. I went home. Meant nothing to me.
Speaker 1: You know, very glad that the movie made a couple
Speaker 1: of hundred million dollars, but it's nothing I'm ever gonna
Speaker 1: care about. Well do you get at this point? Do
Speaker 1: you get offers? And if you get offers, do you
Speaker 1: turn them down? Or is that something that was infrequent
Speaker 1: to begin with? Um, it's infrequent to begin with. I
Speaker 1: get offers when they don't know what they want, so
Speaker 1: they say, get Harvey, he'll fill it in. We didn't.
Speaker 1: The writer didn't write anything. Get Harvey, he'll fill it in.
Speaker 1: Um so bother Um. I did the movie, Bros. Because
Speaker 1: Billy asked me to do it as a favor. He
Speaker 1: wanted all gay casts and wanted me people part of that.
Speaker 1: And that's why I did it. Um, Like I said,
Speaker 1: that minute for thirty seconds, what's the big deal? But
Speaker 1: I don't I don't get offered. Great movie roles I mean,
Speaker 1: and my feeling might be different if I did. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe I would like movies, if if I was offering
Speaker 1: a role that was more than you know, thankless. Okay,
Speaker 1: you've been in movies. You're physically recognizable, certainly in New
Speaker 1: York there's Broadway, there's all kinds of things you recognizable,
Speaker 1: and you also have this voice. Can you go anywhere unrecognized?
Speaker 1: And to what degree is that? And to what degree
Speaker 1: is out of burden when you are recogn No? I mean,
Speaker 1: that's another reason for living up here, is I can go. Also,
Speaker 1: it's placed up here. Nobody knows who I am. It's lovely,
Speaker 1: um not, you know I can't. I well, I can
Speaker 1: walk around New York City most most neighborhoods, and nobody
Speaker 1: will know who I am. You know, I can't walk
Speaker 1: around Broadway. I mean, who was it? And it was
Speaker 1: I think it was Um. When they were doing me
Speaker 1: for sixty minutes which never aired. Um, the reporter called
Speaker 1: me the Mayor of Broadway because we're walking down the day.
Speaker 1: We couldn't he could. We couldn't walk and do the
Speaker 1: interview at the same time because everybody kept coming up
Speaker 1: to me and and interrupting us, um, But that's just lovely.
Speaker 1: You know that's lovely. But then I can also escape
Speaker 1: it as lovely. I you know, I have friends like
Speaker 1: a Robin Williams or Henry Winkler or you know that.
Speaker 1: To spend time with somebody like that who can't go anywhere,
Speaker 1: do anything without causing a crowd it, I don't think
Speaker 1: I could live like that. How about the opposite? By
Speaker 1: being Harvey fire Stein, you get to meet people that
Speaker 1: you never thought you'd be able to meet. You had
Speaker 1: a couple of those experiences. Oh, all the time, all
Speaker 1: the time, and I usually embarrass myself. Did you have
Speaker 1: you watched Have you watched the what is it called
Speaker 1: the Offer that the new series about? No, I haven't
Speaker 1: I know what you're talking about? Right, Well, there's a
Speaker 1: scene with Mario Puozzo. He takes Mario Puozzo. Bob Evans
Speaker 1: takes Mario Puoso into a restaurant. I forget what restaurant
Speaker 1: it is that Frank Sinatra sitting there, and he tells
Speaker 1: him to not go over to the but he goes
Speaker 1: over to the table to meet Frank Sinatra, and Frank
Speaker 1: Sinatra screams and yells at him and calls them all
Speaker 1: kinds of horrible names and all that. That's that's me. I.
Speaker 1: You know, the first time I said, the first time
Speaker 1: I was seated with Meryl Streep, I think I tortured
Speaker 1: that poor woman. Be I had just written a catered affair,
Speaker 1: and I just if she would only do it, if
Speaker 1: I could just get out of starting cater affair, and
Speaker 1: I tortured them. She didn't have a chance. So so
Speaker 1: then the next celebrity I sit next to is um,
Speaker 1: what's the name? Uh Tom Tom, not Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks,
Speaker 1: And so I decided, leave him alone, do not tort you,
Speaker 1: Tom Hanks. You're sitting in his tam one, Tom Hanks.
Speaker 1: Leave him alone. Don't say anything Tim. And I heard later,
Speaker 1: you know, Harvey didn't say a word to me. It
Speaker 1: was what's wrong with him? It's like I'm sitting there
Speaker 1: going hello, and Harvey's like ignoring me. So I'm very stupid. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you're saying, if you're in a public space and
Speaker 1: you see a celebrity, you will get up and talk
Speaker 1: to that celebrity. Sometimes they will and sometimes I won't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't whatever the choice I make, it's the wrong one.
Speaker 1: But There's that other thing about celebrities though, that I
Speaker 1: really love. My favorite thing about celebrities is that they
Speaker 1: all know each other because we all belong to the
Speaker 1: same club, you know. So, Um, the other night, Leah
Speaker 1: Michelle opened in Funny Girl and the place was packed
Speaker 1: with celebrities, and so there was celebrities saying hello this way,
Speaker 1: that way and all that, and and um, I'm so
Speaker 1: embarrassed to tell the story, but it's the truth. Drew
Speaker 1: Barrymore comes up to me and Oh, Harvey, how have
Speaker 1: you been? And I'm thinking to myself, Oh, we belonged
Speaker 1: to this club together, asshole that am We made a
Speaker 1: movie together. We we we spent weeks together on a movie. Um,
Speaker 1: we had a whole relationship with each other. I just
Speaker 1: haven't seen her in years, but you know that's me. Okay.
Speaker 1: Another thing that's very interesting in the book You take
Speaker 1: down Bill Maher. Now, Bill Maher is known for being
Speaker 1: very self satisfied, and a lot of people have been
Speaker 1: wanting to take him down. The experience you mentioned is
Speaker 1: very clear cut in terms of what was said and
Speaker 1: what was done. But to what degree did you say
Speaker 1: I want to put this in the book, And I
Speaker 1: want to mention him specifically. Um, I think you're right.
Speaker 1: I don't like the man. Um. I find him just disgusting.
Speaker 1: And yet, in a funny way, you almost have to
Speaker 1: check in with him every now and then to see
Speaker 1: what he's saying, because he does have a certain voice
Speaker 1: and people do listen to him, and I want to
Speaker 1: hear what he's saying, even though I always think he's
Speaker 1: so fucking wrong. He's so uh. This week he talked
Speaker 1: about the Santis sending the the immigrants to and he
Speaker 1: thought it was great. Right, Oh, he's been so well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're complaining. Look at that beautiful a beach, look at
Speaker 1: that beautiful town. He has no idea what it is
Speaker 1: to be a human being. He hasn't been a human
Speaker 1: being in so long. He only does his complain about
Speaker 1: cancel culture because he can't tell the jokes he wants
Speaker 1: to tell. He has no feelings for anybody else. He
Speaker 1: couldn't care less what anybody else feels like. He just
Speaker 1: wants to tell the jokes. But that's the way it
Speaker 1: is with an addict. I mean the man. I don't
Speaker 1: think that man has gone two days in his life
Speaker 1: without smoking marijuana. I mean you're a drug addict. Admit
Speaker 1: you're a drug addict, and then we can talk if
Speaker 1: you can't go a day without smoking, And that's his
Speaker 1: big issue is, oh I finally have my Marijuanaoa. You know,
Speaker 1: there really is more to life than than checking out.
Speaker 1: You couldn't try enjoying life. And then his attack on
Speaker 1: fat people don't even strove me. But anyway, I decided
Speaker 1: to tell that story more in a funny way for Lynn,
Speaker 1: for Lynn Redgrave, who I do bard, and she was
Speaker 1: so hurt by what he did that day. She actually
Speaker 1: went back and did his show again and never mentioned it. Damn.
Speaker 1: She was a much bigger person than I am. But
Speaker 1: I wanted to tell that story for Lynn and and
Speaker 1: for and for women period, because it's still true to
Speaker 1: this day. He still doesn't have women on his show.
Speaker 1: It's still usually three men or two men and a woman,
Speaker 1: or but it's never three women because he has nothing
Speaker 1: to say to them. I fucked them, I smoke dope
Speaker 1: off them, and life goes on. Well, speaking of THATTS,
Speaker 1: you talk about your own experience with substance abuse and
Speaker 1: twelve step to what degree? Well, there are two sides.
Speaker 1: What degree were you? You know? Hooked and then a
Speaker 1: whole hard was it to get off? But did it
Speaker 1: affect the work or really it was separate from the work. Yes,
Speaker 1: it does. Addiction affect your work. Absolutely. I did not work.
Speaker 1: I did not really right in that hole, there was
Speaker 1: a long slide of alcohol. Alcoholism is not something that
Speaker 1: starts one day, and well it did end one day
Speaker 1: for me. I just hit the bottom. But I at
Speaker 1: the bottom sitting in my garage with the car running.
Speaker 1: Not really a choice there, you know, It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: you and I already had alan on behind me, but
Speaker 1: so I'm sitting in a garage or I wake up
Speaker 1: the next morning because I was too stupid to figure
Speaker 1: out how to kill yourself. Um, and I said, okay,
Speaker 1: the what they predict in ALAN or what they predict
Speaker 1: in a A has happened. My disease wanted to get
Speaker 1: me into a room alone and kill me. It just did.
Speaker 1: It's time to stop taking charge and let somebody else
Speaker 1: take charge. Twelve step pros will tell you God takes charge.
Speaker 1: God to me is a group of drunks. G O
Speaker 1: D group of drunks. You all tell me what to
Speaker 1: do and I will do it. And that's what I did,
Speaker 1: so I never looked back. I had that last drink
Speaker 1: and have never wanted to drink again. I have never
Speaker 1: touched a drink again. I have no desire. And it's
Speaker 1: twenty it's going on twenty eight years. Um. And I
Speaker 1: gave up smoking soon after that, and then eventually Kathen also,
Speaker 1: so does it affect your work? Yes, because working I
Speaker 1: didn't work on alcohol. You you think you're writing something great.
Speaker 1: You know you're drunk and you're writing something great. This
Speaker 1: value had the funniest day I ever wrote. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: that's hysterical, and you look at it the next day
Speaker 1: and go, what is this ship? If you can even
Speaker 1: read it? Because you've scrawled in a cross the beet
Speaker 1: of paper when you were drunk, and you know and
Speaker 1: you don't even know it. Yeah, no, it was. It
Speaker 1: was not good for work. Um. I did a bunch
Speaker 1: of acting in those bad years. UM, and that wasn't
Speaker 1: too bad because you there's a lot of drunk actors
Speaker 1: that can't away with being drunk or drunk. There's something
Speaker 1: about being vulnerable. I think that comes out. But I
Speaker 1: also was a secret drunk. Nobody knew I was drinking.
Speaker 1: I didn't drink once I knew that. I drank only
Speaker 1: once I knew my day was over, even if that
Speaker 1: was noon and I wasn't going to see anybody else.
Speaker 1: That's the other great part about living in the country.
Speaker 1: Couldn't do that in the city. Somebody could always ring
Speaker 1: your doorbell. But living in the country, I could sometimes
Speaker 1: be done with all my day by noon and drink
Speaker 1: until the next day. Um. Yeah, anyway, I don't know what. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got it. To what degree does your Jewish upbringing
Speaker 1: in Jewish sensibility affect your work? Oh, it's everything, It's everything,
Speaker 1: it says, you know, it's Uh. Neil Simon said to
Speaker 1: me in my dress room at tord Song. Notice how
Speaker 1: how acutely I have just dropped that name. Um for
Speaker 1: Nil Simon said to me, where did you come from?
Speaker 1: I said, A couple of blocks from you. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's there. I there's all kinds of reasons, and
Speaker 1: you know, there are hundreds of books on the subject
Speaker 1: of of the You know, I guess the bottom line
Speaker 1: for dramatists anyway, is put two Jews in a room
Speaker 1: together and you'll have three opinions, you know, or or
Speaker 1: as I say, put two rabbis together and what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be agnostic because they both can't believe the same thing.
Speaker 1: If you believe this, I have to believe something else.
Speaker 1: And that is how were trained. I mean, did you
Speaker 1: have that? Did you have religious training? Yeah? So then
Speaker 1: you know that's how we trained. Is the idea. You
Speaker 1: argue this side, you argue that side, and that's how
Speaker 1: you learn the Bible. That's you know, the Christian Bible.
Speaker 1: There lectured, the lectured to fucking death. Memorize this crap,
Speaker 1: and you and they translated, and they and they and
Speaker 1: they they they they add are the meetings that have
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the written word and all that
Speaker 1: which I always laugh when I watched those those preachers
Speaker 1: who turned an innocent phrase into something else choose. I'll
Speaker 1: never forget. When I was sitting doing cottage with my father,
Speaker 1: which I didn't my brother did. Most of the days
Speaker 1: of cottage. I only filled in fam um. But one day,
Speaker 1: you know how they take one line from the from
Speaker 1: the Bible and they discuss it after join the morning prayers.
Speaker 1: It was a measurement of one of the pieces of
Speaker 1: wood to build the arc. And these old men sitting
Speaker 1: there drinking schnaps at seven in the morning, suspected our
Speaker 1: arguing what was the meaning behind that measurement? What I
Speaker 1: always say is Judaism is a questioning religion, and Christianity
Speaker 1: is didactic. Everything's up for grabs. The other thing, you
Speaker 1: put two Jews in a room, it's not gonna be quiet.
Speaker 1: So let's let's just go back to Broadway. So you
Speaker 1: is Broadway always up and down? Or if we really
Speaker 1: hit a different phase with there being so much money
Speaker 1: in it, a lot of non Broadway people, rock stars,
Speaker 1: etcetera getting Broadway and as you say, there are many
Speaker 1: fewer traditional plays and there used to be. What do
Speaker 1: you think about the future of Broadway? I think we
Speaker 1: just missed a great opportunity to invent it all. The
Speaker 1: COVID closed down was such a great opportunity to go
Speaker 1: back and say, Okay, we've gotten a little out of
Speaker 1: control with ticket prices. Now we've gotten a little crazy
Speaker 1: with the unions. Everybody's living very comfortably, that's very nice,
Speaker 1: but charging four hundred I was the ticket for a
Speaker 1: ninety minute show is a little nuts. Can we like
Speaker 1: unravel some of this? And we didn't. They didn't even
Speaker 1: clean the theaters. The Thetis was shut down. Maybe they
Speaker 1: changed the air of filters, you know they but they didn't. You.
Speaker 1: I would have thought they would have gone in and
Speaker 1: painted the dress rooms, but the actors all went back
Speaker 1: and this stuff was still sitting there, exactly where they
Speaker 1: left it two years ago. So I think we missed
Speaker 1: a great opportunity there. But you can't ignore it forever.
Speaker 1: It's gonna come, you know, you you, it's gonna bite
Speaker 1: you on the as. Eventually the truth has to come
Speaker 1: out and change will happen, whether you want change to
Speaker 1: happen or not. So I still think it's coming, just
Speaker 1: like whoever thought Phantom of the Opera would close? But
Speaker 1: it's closed or it's closing, whether you like it or not,
Speaker 1: nothing stays the same. It moves on, it moves on.
Speaker 1: So there will be a new day on Broadway. It
Speaker 1: will be what we say in twelve Steps, we say,
Speaker 1: I never let let go of anything without leaving claw
Speaker 1: marks Broadway. Believe claw marks out all those buildings. But
Speaker 1: it will change just because it has to, because it's
Speaker 1: not it's not it's not a concert. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: what's the name Elton John? They just figured out he's
Speaker 1: gonna personally personally take over thirty million dollars from this
Speaker 1: next tour. He's doing Springsteen, who I adore, charging the
Speaker 1: prices he charged for his Broadway show, you know, absurd.
Speaker 1: He doesn't need that kind of money to come out
Speaker 1: of his house. He doesn't need that. Why can't you
Speaker 1: do a show for because you love it? Why? I mean, why,
Speaker 1: why does everything have to be about money? And why
Speaker 1: is a thousand dollars a ticket? Because I bought two
Speaker 1: tickets for my brother to see the show for a
Speaker 1: birthday president of thousand, and I was getting you know,
Speaker 1: I wasn't getting kicked up to the high prices I
Speaker 1: was getting from the theater owner, who's one of my
Speaker 1: best friends. I was getting a decent price. And it
Speaker 1: was nine something per ticket plus the extra charges they
Speaker 1: put on it. It's not right. Well, let me just
Speaker 1: ask you. Just staying on that point, we're not going
Speaker 1: into Springsteen Renny specific shows, not that I'm unwilling to
Speaker 1: do that. What many people say Hamilton's being the bestis ample.
Speaker 1: If we don't charge that price, the money goes to
Speaker 1: the scalpers, right, That's what That's what Springsteen just said. Um,
Speaker 1: he said Why should the money go to the scalpers.
Speaker 1: Why shouldn't I get that money? Uh? I do think
Speaker 1: they can control that better. I think producers and theater
Speaker 1: owners would rather have the money in the bank from
Speaker 1: the scalpers and then turn their backs. But could they
Speaker 1: turn to a scalper I don't know that that would
Speaker 1: be legal or not and say you could only add
Speaker 1: this much to the ticket price. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's legal or not. Well, there are ways to do it,
Speaker 1: restrict with paperless I don't want to Why don't they
Speaker 1: work on that while while we were closed down for
Speaker 1: two years? Why not put I could have a whole
Speaker 1: discussion about this. The irony is people don't want it
Speaker 1: because people want to scalp the tickets them selves. They
Speaker 1: want to sell it. This has been a big thing
Speaker 1: in the music business forever. I'm not apologizing for the acts,
Speaker 1: I'm not apologizing for promoters. But you would think the
Speaker 1: public would be on the same page. Well, no, because
Speaker 1: then I won't be able to go to the last
Speaker 1: minute and pay or no, if I buy tickets, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get rid of my tickets. But let's not go
Speaker 1: down that avenue today, because ultimately We're on the same page.
Speaker 1: It should not cost that amount of I had a friend.
Speaker 1: I had a friend sit outside the Harry Styles um
Speaker 1: Theater the other day because she had a connection that
Speaker 1: was supposed to be able to come through with the
Speaker 1: ticket if a ticket, And she stayed there until the
Speaker 1: curtain went up, and the ticket never came through. And
Speaker 1: she because she couldn't afford the thousand dollars to see
Speaker 1: Harry Styles, who she really wanted to see. And it
Speaker 1: breaks my heart. It breaks my heart. Why shouldn't they?
Speaker 1: I mean, I went, you know, when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I went to Carnegie Hall to see Buffy Sick Marie. Okay,
Speaker 1: not Eric Styles, but I went to see down of It.
Speaker 1: I saw Bob Dilly, and I saw I saw oh
Speaker 1: my heroes live on the money I can afford, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty dollar tickets Broadway. I mean, of course, I'm being
Speaker 1: silly now, But when I was a little kid, my
Speaker 1: family and I four of us, my father, my mother,
Speaker 1: my brother, and I two dollars and fifty cents a ticket.
Speaker 1: We sat in the first row of the balcony, perfect seats.
Speaker 1: You could see everything. For ten bucks. Fifteen cents was
Speaker 1: the Subway. Well I think it was sixty cents. But
Speaker 1: the problem is bigger than Broadway. It's about incomm inequality.
Speaker 1: I mean, no one had billions back then. Well there's
Speaker 1: also but there's also that. You know, we added the
Speaker 1: half prize booth, which is a wonderful thing. But I
Speaker 1: was a child seeing Broadway. Whether I went into theater
Speaker 1: or not, my life was changed by seeing Just if
Speaker 1: I saw nothing but Fiddler on the Roof, my life
Speaker 1: was changed by seeing a stage full of Jews. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine the kid who's went to see whose kids,
Speaker 1: whose life is not so good, who went to see
Speaker 1: Hamilton's and had his life changed? Do you know how
Speaker 1: many lives Hamilton's can change? And I know they've got
Speaker 1: it on Disney Plus, it's not the same. It's not
Speaker 1: the same. It's not it's not having seen in a
Speaker 1: number of times with the original casts and subsequent casts.
Speaker 1: It's different. But what's this bit about you're retired. Oh well,
Speaker 1: I like to joke that I'm retired. I mean, it
Speaker 1: would take a lot to get me to do eight
Speaker 1: shows a week. I'd have to really love the play
Speaker 1: because it is hard to do eight shows a week. Um,
Speaker 1: you know working. I mean, who else works six days
Speaker 1: a week the way you know us theater people do
Speaker 1: and eight shows a week is hard, you know, But
Speaker 1: but there are things. I mean, I'm opening next week
Speaker 1: in Guys and Dolls at the Kennedy Center, and how
Speaker 1: about your commitment. I'm gonna be home every day because
Speaker 1: we prerecorded my role. They offered me the role of
Speaker 1: Big Julie, which is a fun role, but I said
Speaker 1: so he said, if you remember Guys and Dolls, they
Speaker 1: need a place to have the crap game. And so
Speaker 1: nicely nicely calls this guy who runs a underground garage
Speaker 1: and says, can we have the garage? Says here, you
Speaker 1: can have the garage. You gotta pay me up front.
Speaker 1: And it's a three page long scene of saying you
Speaker 1: gotta bay me up front. You gotta bay me up front.
Speaker 1: And so I record. I prerecorded it, and uh so
Speaker 1: I will be at the Kennedy Center. I think they
Speaker 1: don't even I don't even think I'm in the pro rap.
Speaker 1: I think you'll just hear my voice and people will
Speaker 1: realize it's me. Okay, Harvey, I can literally talk to
Speaker 1: you for days. You're so easy to talk to. But
Speaker 1: I think we've come to the end of the feeling
Speaker 1: we've known for today. Good. So I want to thank
Speaker 1: you Harvey for doing this. Uh you tell a great story.
Speaker 1: They're also in the book. You can get the audio version.
Speaker 1: So thanks again for taking the time. Thank you for
Speaker 1: having me. I realized it was also two hours out
Speaker 1: of your life. Okay, but it's also two hours for
Speaker 1: many people who don't have the access I have. Okay,
Speaker 1: till next time. This is Bob left sets