Broadway Tails (11 page)

We were there the next day at noon. Rehearsal was due to start at 1:00, but the theater was locked, leaving us standing in the street. I argued with the doorman, pointing out that Cameron Mackintosh had arranged the time for us, but the doorman refused to unlock the door. Sam came nearly an hour later. When I confronted him, he claimed that he had forgotten we were supposed to have the stage. By then it was too late—rehearsal was starting. That night, like the night before, Buffy went out, heard the audience, turned around, and ran back offstage. And like the night before, Cameron Mackintosh came storming into my room without knocking, saying, “I told you I was going to fire you if the dog didn’t perform, and she didn’t perform!”

I said, “Excuse me. I didn’t get rehearsal today.” When he insisted he had left orders for us to get rehearsal, I told him to check with the stage manager. “The time was not arranged,” I told him. At that point he said we’d have time the next day, but he wanted to see Buffy perform at the matinee. We did get the stage for a half-hour before the show. Unfortunately, by that time, almost all of Buffy’s time onstage had been frightening for her.
She was very tentative about going onstage and climbing those stairs—in fact, she was shaking when she did it during rehearsal. I thought we might have to do this every day—to reassure her before every show—but when I asked Sam if we could do that, he only said, “We’ll see.”

That afternoon, for the third show in a row, Buffy went out, heard the audience, and ran off the stage. Mr. Mackintosh, for the third time in a row, came to see me after the show and wanted to know what was going wrong. Again I tried to explain about the lack of rehearsal, but he said he didn’t care. I had one more chance to get Buffy to do the trick, or I was fired. It probably was one of the lowest moments in my life. I had been painted into a corner, and there was no way I could get myself out of it. I thought my career as a trainer would be ruined. We had the stage set aside from six to seven o’clock. I knew that Buffy had been scared past the point of no return and that no amount of rehearsal time could help now. Lydia couldn’t do it—she was so arthritic she had to be carried upstairs.

There was only one dog left.

*   *   *

Up until this point, Vito had been living the good life. He had two meals a day. Even though we had to keep him separate from the other dogs, he had people who cared for him and he had a comfy bed. Because noise didn’t wake him up, he spent a lot of time sleeping. I had taught him basic obedience—
sit
and
stay
—using the same hand signals I used with the other dogs, and as long as he was looking at me, he was a quick learner. I even had a special way of exercising him. Because he couldn’t hear me when I called him, I couldn’t let him run free without a leash. He loved to fetch, but he didn’t always see where the ball went, so you could throw it only a few feet. Then one night when I took him for a walk, I brought a flashlight with me. He started to chase the spot of light on the ground like it was a ball. I was amazed. I put him on his tether and let him chase the light for about twenty minutes until he just dropped with happy exhaustion. I was pleased we had found a game he could play.

We had started bringing Vito to the theater and keeping him in his crate in the dressing room so that we could walk him and care for him during the long days of rehearsals and performances. Vito was the only dog I had that was a bull terrier and, unlike Lydia, could at least walk upstairs, but I had not done any work with him. All I had done was make him healthy and exercise him with a flashlight. Dejected over the situation with Buffy, I brought Vito down to the stage and sat with him. He stayed beside me, watching my every move. I couldn’t think of any way to train him for the play. He couldn’t hear the commands, and he wouldn’t be able to see me if he wasn’t looking in the right direction when I gave the cue. Just to give him some exercise, I pulled the flashlight out and started shining it on the stage. He was really focused on it—he thought we had a new indoor play space. He was so intent that when I ran the beam up the steps he followed it, and then he followed it back down.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I asked my assistant to hold him stage right. I climbed the stairs to the bridge, then flashed the light through the pattern. Vito chased it up the stairs, across the bridge, and down the other side. I turned off the flashlight and gave him a biscuit. We brought him back stage right and I showed him the pattern again, this time shielding the light so it wasn’t as bright. He did it perfectly. He couldn’t wait to get his biscuit on the other side. Then we tried it the way it would happen in the show. I stood in the wings stage left, my assistant held Vito stage right. On cue, I turned on the light and he ran up the stairs, across the bridge, down the other side, and over to me to get his cookie. We did it six times in all, and he did it perfectly every time. I was stunned. At this point we had spent almost two and a half months training Buffy, and all that training had been wasted because she was so frightened of the stage. Here was a dog that had lived through brutal fights, had survived a deadly disease, was deaf, and was thankful just to play with me and a flashlight and get a cookie, yet he had done the behavior perfectly six times in a row. At that moment, I thought there might be a chance.

That night, we did the first two scenes in the first act as usual. As the big scene approached, I showed Vito the flashlight. I ran around to the other side of the stage and shined it up the staircase. To my amazement he ran up the steps, over the bridge, and down the other side with the cast chasing behind him, screaming, “Where’s Bill Sikes?” and the audience cheering. It was a miracle. Of course, when I stopped to think about it, I realized he didn’t need to get used to the noise and commotion in the theater. He couldn’t hear it. And because we had done the behavior just two hours earlier, he recognized it immediately. As far as he was concerned, we were just playing the same game we had played in the empty theater.

Cameron Mackintosh never came back to say congratulations, and Sam Stickler never said a word. Neither did the director. But the cast and the crew were ecstatic. They called him St. Vito for creating a miracle. That odd-looking, deaf dog had saved my career. Unfortunately, the show got mixed to bad reviews. The director had re-created his original production, but Broadway had changed a lot in twenty years, and the show now seemed dated.
Oliver
closed after thirteen previews and seventeen performances. That put me in a tough situation. I had really come to love these crazy bull terriers, and I wanted to keep them. But bull terriers demand a lot from their owners, a real commitment of time and energy, and I couldn’t give that to them. I had to do what was right for the dogs and find them homes. Buffy, of course, was easy. She returned to her owner, who was very glad to have her back. Lydia was adopted by a cast member, and she spent the rest of her life on a nice, comfy couch.

I thought Vito, with his deafness and his aggression, would be difficult to place. But after the miracle of being rescued from fighting and the miracle in the theater, St. Vito had one more miracle coming. We found a wonderful breeder who took in only dogs that had been fought brutally and let them live the rest of their lives in peace. And there, Vito got all the love and attention he deserved.

In the mid-1980s, Broadway was reeling from “the British Invasion.” Most of the big hits were musical extravaganzas like
Cats
and
Phantom of the Opera
. Few shows were being produced with roles for animals. After
Annie
closed in 1983, I worked on a series of
Annie
revivals, off-Broadway shows, regional theater, television, and films. But by 1986 I was thirty years old and disillusioned with the entertainment field. I had garnered a lot of respect as an animal trainer for Broadway, but at this point, mostly to pay the rent, I had to work at just about anything.

I really disliked the film work. Animals—and animal trainers—were very much an afterthought in films. Check the credits the next time you watch a movie. If an animal is involved, even in a major role, the credit is placed near the bottom of the list, somewhere after the caterers. Animals were treated like props, and we were usually hired by the props department. There never was a chance to talk with the writer, director, actors, or creative team until the day of the shoot, so it was hard to prepare the animals for what they really needed to do. We were often given incorrect information, and things were constantly changing. Rehearsal on the set was nonexistent, and the pressure was very high because you have to get the whole project done in a certain amount of time that was entirely based on the budget.

In addition, now I had become just one of many that provided animals for the entertainment field in New York City. But with no unions for animal trainers, the producers made us bid against each other to keep rates down. The agencies were very competitive, and when I tried to organize a union, the response was, “Go ahead. We won’t join. We’ll underbid you and get all the work.” So I made the decision to get out of animal training altogether and move back to Connecticut. The only thing I really knew how to do was theater, so I hoped to get into producing or theater management. I found a small house in Haddam—a two-bedroom prefab on four acres—close to the Goodspeed Opera House, where my career had started. In the fall of 1986, I loaded up the truck and moved to what I called “the farm” with my ten dogs, three cats, and two goats.

After looking for a while, I decided to take a job at Goodspeed as house manager. I still had many friends there. Sandy was twelve years old and a local hero, so I went back. It wasn’t really the job I wanted, but at least I was working back in the theater with a weekly paycheck. Then, in the summer of 1987, soon after I had started my job at Goodspeed, New York’s Lincoln Center decided to do a revival of the Cole Porter musical,
Anything Goes
. Lincoln Center called the Goodspeed, looking for “that guy” who trained the dog for
Annie
. Just as I was moving out of Broadway and New York, Broadway was calling me back.

Except it wasn’t really Broadway. Lincoln Center is a major cultural institution that does absolutely first-class productions. They present all types of performances—music, dance, theater, opera—drawing a wide variety of audiences. But because Lincoln Center is a nonprofit organization, it is considered an off-Broadway theater. And while it’s a great credit to have, actors and stagehands at Lincoln Center get paid about half the salary of their Broadway counterparts. Lincoln Center, at the time, was paying their actors $650 for a minimum core salary. They would only pay $400 for a
trainer and two dogs to be used in
Anything Goes
. I was really torn about this production. The pay wasn’t great, but I was drawn to it because of the talent involved. Patti Lupone was starring, and Jerry Zaks was making his directorial debut. But after years of struggling and the decision to walk away, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to New York. Outside of
Oliver
, I hadn’t had a Broadway show in five years. At around the same time, Goodspeed was preparing a new musical based on the old Little Rascals/Our Gang comedies. They needed an American Staffordshire terrier, generally known as a pit bull, to play Pete the Pup. As far as Goodspeed was concerned, they had a built-in trainer on staff once again, which was me. With
Little Rascals
opening, and the chance of another hit like
Annie
here in Connecticut, I decided to return to training.

I told Lincoln Center that the money wasn’t enough to acquire dogs, set up housing, and cover transportation back and forth to the theater. I suggested finding someone who already lived near the theater, who had two dogs, and who could work cheaply. I would train them and supervise them for the show. That solution seemed agreeable to everyone, so we put a notice in the theatrical newspaper
Backstage
. A lot of unemployed actors responded, and we hired an older actress and her two untrained Yorkies who lived near the theater. Goodspeed agreed to help me make time to get to rehearsals in New York to set up
Anything Goes
, come back to East Haddam to set up rehearsals for
Little Rascals
, and then also run the theater at night.

Because
Anything Goes
was a revival of an older musical, the dog was really just used as a sight gag. In the plot, a young socialite and her mother, who owns the little dog, go on a very fancy cruise in search of a rich husband. But the young socialite has fallen in love with a poor musician who stows away on the boat to be with her. He finds the small dog and shaves off its fur to make a false beard for himself as a disguise. In the final scene, when everyone is reconciled, the captain brings out a hairless dog and asks if it belongs to anyone. The dog is returned to the mother and everyone lives happily ever after.

The director wanted the dog to make entrances to the center of the stage, but because Lincoln Center was trying to do a first-class production on a low budget, they decided to pay for just one week of rehearsal. While the two Yorkies were very sweet, they were also very spoiled and untrained. That meant the best we could do was have them carried around onstage. Getting the dogs set up, instructing the actress on how to handle them backstage, and running the show was very simple: One of the dogs was used with a long coat, and the other dog was shaved so that she had very short hair. Everything seemed to be fine.
Anything Goes
was a very smart, witty production with the music of Cole Porter. It got rave reviews and became an overnight hit. The show would ultimately run almost two years.

The opening-night party at Lincoln Center was very exciting. It felt very good to be back in a hit again. The dogs were getting mentioned in some of the reviews, reestablishing my name in New York. Then I immediately turned around and went back to Goodspeed to open
Little Rascals
, where Pete the Pup had a fairly large role. Unfortunately, the reviews for that show weren’t as good. The creative team kept working, trying to create another family-friendly musical like
Annie
. Unfortunately, the composer, Joe Raposo, became ill and the show never really came together. It closed after the scheduled run.

As
Anything Goes
settled in for its run, the actress we had hired to handle the dogs started to let the success of the show go to her head. She wanted more money, and she started demanding better treatment backstage. I was getting calls from the stage managers and company managers, asking if I could please talk to her and straighten her out. As much as I tried, she felt that because her little dogs were the canine stars of the show, she deserved more, even though she had a signed contract. It became clear by November that we would have to ask her to leave.

Then I was faced with the problem of having to fulfill my contract on the budget provided. One of my trainers, Lane Haverly, agreed that he
would move back to New York and do the show. Once he rented an apartment, he would be working for almost nothing, but he would do it just to preserve our careers. The plan was for him to take over around Christmas, which meant we only had a month to find two new dogs. I started searching area pounds for small Yorkies that were calm, sweet, and nonaggressive. I wasn’t having any luck finding two dogs, so I was forced to call reputable breeders in the area.

We finally found a dog at a breeder in Oxford, Connecticut. She had several litters of teacup Yorkies that were much larger than the breed standard, so they couldn’t be sold as teacups. The breeder just wanted to get rid of them, so we adopted a young male named Oscar, who had the right temperament to be in the show, to be the main dog. As we were looking for the dog that would be shaved, we heard of another breeder who had an older dog they were going to euthanize because she wasn’t producing puppies anymore. The dog’s name was Windy.

When we saw Windy, she looked twice her age. When breeders have dogs produce litter after litter without a break, the mothers start losing calcium because they’re producing milk for the puppies, and their overall health suffers. Their bones get brittle and their teeth fall out. When we found Windy she was six or seven years old, but she walked like she had arthritis, she had hair loss over the majority of her body, and she had no teeth. When dogs don’t have any teeth in their mouths, there’s nothing to keep their tongue in, so it just sort of hangs out to the side. She actually looked very comical, like she had been beat up and was a little knocked out. We felt so sorry for this dog that we adopted her as the second dog. There was no budget for an understudy, so we had to make sure neither of these dogs got sick.

Once we had Oscar and Windy, we moved Lane Haverly into my old apartment on West 52nd Street, and then he took over. We got the show back on track and everything seemed to be going well. In the summer of 1988, Lincoln Center decided that they were going to send out a national
tour, setting it up as a commercial venture
—
a nationwide, for-profit tour starring Leslie Uggams, Rex Smith, and Rip Taylor. We started rehearsal for that production in September. Instead of using Yorkies, the director decided to use a Pomeranian and a Chihuahua so that in the first scene, it was a very furry, fuzzy dog, and in the end it was completely bald. This was another case where I felt we’d get the best results if the dogs were being handled by someone with a very similar background to mine. All my trainers were busy, so I asked my cousin Rhona Hanson if she would go out with the tour, and she did.

The tour went out in October 1988 and didn’t do as well as they had hoped. The dogs were retired by the spring, but the director liked the look of the Chihuahua as the shaved dog, and brought her into the New York production for a while. Ultimately they decided to put Windy back in, and she and Oscar stayed with the show until it closed in September 1989, after 784 performances.

The dogs were very loved by the company. They had their own small dressing room, but every night Oscar would sneak out to say hello to the rest of the cast. When the show closed, Lane Haverly adopted him, and they had a good life together. Windy was so debilitated when we first got her that she could only walk a few feet before becoming exhausted. We
brought her to a holistic vet who gave us nutritional advice and set up a healthy diet for her. When a dog is that old and is having health problems, I generally don’t put her up for adoption. It isn’t fair to the new owners, who will have to assume all the extra work and medical expenses that come with an older dog—and it isn’t fair to the dog. So Windy came back to the farm and lived with me for another three years until she finally passed away.