TOM JONES AND HARVEY SCHMIDT

SPOTLIGHT ON: TOM JONES & HARVEY SCHMIDT

The complete interview by Nancy Rosati
Originally published on www.TalkinBroadway.org

The following interview was conducted in late 2001 just before the close of (the original production of) The Fantasticks in January 2002:

Tom Jones wrote the book and lyrics, and Harvey Schmidt wrote the music for The Fantasticks, which closes January 13, 2002, almost 42 years after its opening on May 3, 1960. It is the longest-running production in the history of the American theatre.

Jones and Schmidt also wrote two successful Broadway shows, 110 in the Shade and I Do! I Do!, and several small-scale musicals at Portfolio, their theatre workshop. The most notable of these efforts were Celebration, which moved to Broadway, and Philemon, which won an Outer Critics Circle Award.

In 1998, Jones and Schmidt starred in a musical revue of their own work called The Show Goes On at The York Theatre. They received an OBIE Award and the 1992 Special Tony Award for The Fantasticks. They were inducted into the Broadway Hall of Fame at the Gershwin Theatre, and their “stars” were added to the Off Broadway Walk of Fame outside the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

NANCY ROSATI: I know you met in college but I want to hear a little bit about your background before that. What did you want to be when you grew up?

HARVEY SCHMIDT: We both wanted to be out of the state of Texas, (laughs) although now I’ve moved back to Texas. I always wanted to live in New York. These little towns in Texas didn’t have anything back then. There’s more now with television but I grew up in the Depression years in the 1930s and all we had were movies, which were glorious when you got to see them. Then there was radio — two very separate things. That was it — our only touch with the outside world. I wanted so much to learn more about music. I loved the music I heard on the radio. I lived for the symphony broadcasts on the weekend. Some of the entertainment shows at that time had wonderful music and so did the movies. I’ve always played and composed by ear but I never planned to have a career with music because I couldn’t read or write it. Instead I concentrated on art. I sat alone very happily, drawing while listening to Toscanini conducting on the radio. When I went to college at the University of Texas, it was like going to paradise because there were hundreds of people who did what I did.

NR: Did you go to school for music?

HS: No, I went there for art, but then fate, or “Dame Fortune” stepped in and I met Tom. Tom was a drama major a couple of years ahead of me. I was an art major but they needed a pianist for something called “The Curtain Club” so I started accompanying the drama students. LPs were just coming out for the first major Broadway shows like Kiss Me Kate. I learned all this music then and I got so interested in it just trying to accompany these drama students. Because of that, we did a show together. It was a revue of the first 50 years of American music. The director of this revue, a mutual friend of ours who later directed The Fantasticks in New York, Word Baker, asked if I would be Musical Director. I was thrilled. I didn’t know how to be Musical Director but my schooling had been through MGM musicals, so I knew what they should sound like and when you have to do key changes, and when you have the chorus come in real big. I just played Musical Director and it was a smashing success. Tom did all the comedy acts and materials but our channels were separate. We didn’t really work together. A year later we wrote our first musical together. Tom invited me and he was so bright it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

NR: Tom, how did you get to the University of Texas?

TOM JONES: I was from a small town in west Texas too and . . . we never had any live theater, except, every summer there was a wonderful tent show that would come up and tour these little Texas towns. They’d put up a tent on a vacant lot and they would play for a full week. They would sell popcorn and Cracker Jacks with a prize in each and every package, and they would have a drawing at intermission with kewpie dolls for prizes. They would do live shows with some music on the side. It was a mixture of rural drama, comedies, and vaudeville, so between the scenes the actors would play in the band or do something else. I don’t know how I knew that I was going to be in the theater, but I knew I wanted to be somebody other than who I was. By the time I was 12 years old, I could get attention by pretending to be somebody else. I performed for anybody. I was an usher at the local movie theater. On Wednesday nights they would have a talent show for local people. I was in high school and after ushering, I would run back and put on my bow tie. I was the MC introducing these acts and then I would do a routine that I stole from the radio. I would do my “Zero Mostel routine” and the audience looked at me as if I were from outer space. It was a very small western Texas town and I wore a sailor straw hat and carried a cane to school. I smoked a pipe and I signed all of my papers, including the column I wrote for the high school newspaper, “T. Collins Jones, Esq.” It’s a wonder they didn’t stop me. They just figured “that’s old crazy Tommy.”

HS: I would have gotten beaten to a pulp at any of my high schools if I did that.

NR: How have you stayed behind the scenes in all these shows for all these years? Did you want to be on stage?

TJ: When you’re little, you don’t know there’s anything but acting. You don’t know there’s writing or directing. When I prepared myself to be in the theater, which I’d never really seen, I went to the University of Texas and there were all these crazy people there. It was glorious. I got very nervous when I performed. After many years of analysis in New York I finally got over that, but I would belch. I became famous as a “belching actor.” I did Doolittle in Pygmalion belching and Kit Carson in The Time of Your Life belching. It occurred to me at some point that maybe I wasn’t doing the audience or my stomach any particular favors. I also realized that the power seemed to be with the director. If you’re the director you get to tell people, “No, let’s do that again” and that was very attractive to me.

NR: You discovered that fact in college, and that’s when the two of you met?

TJ: Yes. Neither of us wanted to be writers, even in college. I was a director and he was an art student. We got the chance to do a college musical. I got the chance to direct it. It paid money. The scripts and the scores I got were just terrible and I thought, “I can do better than this. I’ll just get this talented guy (indicating Harvey) on the phone” and indeed we wrote this college revue. It was a traditional title that they did every year called Time Staggers On.

HS: It was a play on the newsreel Time Marches On.

TJ: Even though we didn’t want to be writers, our show was such an incredible success that it was just astonishing to us. In all of my years there, I’d never seen anything like this. We were in a 1,200 seat house and they sold it out. They sold out the aisles. They sold out the windows. They opened the windows so people could gather outside.

HS: We’ve never had a bigger hit.

TJ: That’s right. Our college friends think we’ve been going downhill ever since. Then we went in the Army and we were going on about our own careers. But something about all that just haunted us — the success and the fun of doing it. So we started writing songs by mail.

HS: Tom would send me lyrics in the Army. He was stationed in the “mysterious East.”

TJ: Not the Far East — it was the “mysterious Baltimore, Maryland.”

HS: I hadn’t been to Baltimore so it was mysterious to me. Also, he was in . . .

TJ: . . . the Counter Intelligence Corps. I was countering intelligence wherever it reared its ugly head in the Army . . . which wasn’t too often.

HS: He had strange addresses that weren’t real Army addresses. If I asked him a question he said he couldn’t answer that. We couldn’t talk on the phone. He started sending me lyrics.

TJ: (teasing) What you didn’t know was that they were coded messages to North Korea.

HS: I lucked out after basic training. I’m a very weak person. I went into the lieutenant’s office, practically in tears. (I wasn’t crying, because you can’t cry in the Army.) I said, “You have made a terrible mistake. I can’t march these troops around,” and he could tell I was serious, so they made up a perfect job for me. I was in charge of training aids at an army movie theater. I had offices in what had once been dressing rooms, which I constantly decorated with Army surplus. Everything in the Army you have to steal or beg or borrow. Every morning a Jeep driver took me to the main post at Fort Bliss . . . I went sailing by with my own driver to pick up two films for the day. The rest of the day I would draw and paint. Mostly I would do officers’ helmets. They would get promotions and I would have to paint their new insignia on their helmets. Tom would send me these lyrics and there was a stage there. I’d get out on the stage and I’d sing and dance working on these songs, alone in this theater. It couldn’t have been more perfect.

NR: Does Tom still write the lyrics first?

HS & TJ: (simultaneously) We work both ways.

HS: You get a richer score that way.

TJ: And very often we sort of “cross pollinate.” In other words, I’ll have a title and part of a song. I’ll give it to Harvey and he will fill it out with the music. Then it will come back to me for lyrics and it will go back and forth.

NR: How did you get from the Korean War to New York?

TJ: I’m older than Harvey. I know it doesn’t look it, but I am. I went into the Army first and I got out of it first. Harvey always had “city intentions.” I didn’t. As a little kid, Harvey had these visions of New York City with glass streets like in an MGM musical.

HS: Because all the musical numbers were about Manhattan and they were always dancing on black glass floors with skyscrapers in the background, so I thought that was what New York was.

TJ: I didn’t have those kinds of romantic visions of New York but I didn’t know where else I could go with this peculiar thing that I did, which was that I knew something about the stage. I didn’t know anything about movies. There wasn’t any television. I was on television many times before I ever saw television.

HS: Me too. We both did some shows but I had never seen it.

NR: You were both on television that early?

HS: They didn’t have it in Austin. We had to drive to San Antonio. A professor would drive us down on Sunday and we did revues in a tiny room.

TJ: And the screens were very small.

HS: I thought, “I will never get a television set because this is so sleazy compared to movies.” No one had a set.

TJ: Anyway, I knew of no place else to go or nothing else to do. My friend, Harry Rigby, who produced many things like Irene and Sugar Babies, used to say “Producing is the last refuge of the hopelessly inept.” That was sort of my situation. I wasn’t producing but I wasn’t equipped to do anything else except wear a sailor straw hat and carry a cane and do imitations of Zero Mostel. I came to New York with the intentions of being a director but it became evident right away that you could tell people what a wonderful director you were, but they weren’t convinced. You had to have something to show. On the other hand, if you could write something down, like nightclub things or comedy material . . . I had a friend, Tom Poston. He’s been on sitcoms for 50 years now. He wanted to do comedy so I wrote and directed a comedy sketch which got wonderful reviews. Then we were hired at Le Ruban Bleu Supper Club. We were the darlings of New York for two weeks. We opened at Le Ruban Bleu and all of the things that we’d done at the showcase theater at the Mark Hellinger, which had been so deliriously well received, didn’t do as well this time. It was really “anarchy comedy.” We were ahead of our time . . . or behind it. It was a disaster, so I realized I had to regroup. Harvey was due to get out of the Army. My father was a turkey hatcheryman. (David Merrick always thought that was very funny that my father hatched turkeys, given the connotation in the theater.) I went back and got a job candling turkey eggs, which means you wipe the crap off of them with a little piece of steel wool, while listening to the radio all day long. It was one of the more restful jobs I’ve ever had in my life.

HS: I would have loved it. I love anything where you can work and play the radio and get paid for it.

TJ: I saved whatever meager money I got from that and waited for Harvey to get out. Our friend, Word Baker, had a wife and two kids and another one on the way. He had gone to teach at Auburn College in Alabama. We had this plan that we were going to put together a revue of comedy songs and material. We would all group together and go to New York and take it by storm. It was a revue called Portfolio. We came to New York but we never could get the financing to do it, although a lot of the material caught the attention of some of these revue people. Harvey immediately had a very successful career as a commercial artist — one of the top in America. Meanwhile, I was working in book stores and teaching a little drama group at St. Bartholomew’s. We began to do material for Julius Monk’s Upstairs-Downstairs and for the Shoestring Revues and things like that. We began to work on a show called Roadside. We wrote five or six songs. We couldn’t get the rights to it. I also didn’t have enough skill to solve the problems of the book so we put it aside. We started working on this play based on something by [Edmond] Rostand. We couldn’t get that to work, although we worked on it for several years. It just wouldn’t work. Finally Word Baker said, “I got a job directing three one-act plays at a summer theater that Mildred Dunnock runs, using the stage at Barnard College. She said I could do one of them as a musical. If you can take that Rostand thing you’ve been working on and write it as a long one-act musical in three weeks, I can give you a production three weeks after that.” We threw out everything we had except a song called “Try to Remember” and went back to the original play. We’d been trying to do this in the style of Rodgers and Hammerstein, which we didn’t know how to do, and which this little innocent play couldn’t sustain. We decided, “What the heck. It’s never going to get put on anyway” so we did all the things we liked in the theater — all the presentation things, the commedia dell’arte, the Shakespeare, the Oriental theater, the invisible prop man sprinkling snow — everything that used the imagination, a celebration of theatricality. We put it on and lo and behold we got offers from three different producers. We chose Lore Noto. It took eight months to raise the $15,000 that it took to put on the show. Then it opened . . .

NR: And look what happened.

TJ: Exactly. It could just as easily have disappeared and been gone forever. It could have disappeared after opening, even though Jerry Orbach was dynamite. The whole company was wonderful but the first couple of notices were cool and there was some real serious talk about closing it on opening night. Nobody would ever have heard of it again. Now, I think if somebody were smart, they would re-issue some of the really good recordings of “Try to Remember.” “Try to remember the kind of September” of innocence. All of that has an amazing resonance and it has it now at the theater. You can just feel it.

HS: There was a wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal recently. The woman who reviews for them was wandering the streets dazed the day of the bombing, and there were ashes everywhere and she was so depressed. She was trying to get home to Brooklyn and she suddenly found herself on Sullivan Street and saw the sign for The Fantasticks. She was tired of walking so she went in.

TJ: She had never seen the show.

HS: She had known it was going to close now so she decided to go in and rest her feet. At the top of the show El Gallo starts singing “Try to remember the kind of September” and she found it terribly moving so she did a long piece on the show.

NR: What are your thoughts on the closing? Are you ready to let it go?

HS: Oh yeah. As recently as our anniversary party last spring I was saying, “If this has run 41 years, I think it can run to 50” and Tom said, “Be careful what you say.” Here we are and it’s not running, but I don’t mind. We were young when it opened and look at us now. It’s been a long time. It’s been wonderful to have it. I’d rather it close when I’m still alive.

TJ: (to Harvey) How are you feeling? You going to make it to January?

HS: I don’t know what I think. . . . I’m thinking about what’s coming up rather than what’s in the past.

NR: I’m sure you’ve changed over all these years.

HS: Yes. We’re both much more knowledgeable. I think we can write things more easily too.

TJ: We’ve changed but I think the principles that we have haven’t changed. We’ve never in that way been timely. I don’t like to say that we’ve been “timeless” but the stuff that we do has never been specifically au courant. The Fantasticks is not that . . . They’re not locked into time periods.

NR: I have a question about Grover’s Corners. I keep hearing that Our Town has so much more resonance after September 11th. I’m wondering if we might get a chance to see that.

TJ: We don’t have the rights anymore. They’ve reverted to the estate.

HS: They wanted a certain important production and it came close with us but it never actually happened. Once the estate had Hello, Dolly! . . .

TJ: Just like the Lynn Riggs estate. It’s very tricky. The only other thing they had from the Lynn Riggs estate was a little thing called Oklahoma!. Sometimes it’s hard to explain to people that everything you do doesn’t turn into Oklahoma!.

NR: I’d like to hear more about your Portfolio Studio.

HS: That was a wonderful period. Right after we’d done I Do! I Do! we had quite a bit of money rolling in with regular royalties and things, so we decided to do an experimental workshop where we would do everything — write, direct and I would design.

TJ: It’s called “egomania!” Or hubris which is punished by nemesis. So we had both hubris and nemesis - act 1 and act 2.

HS: We looked all over New York. It’s very hard to find a space in New York that doesn’t have columns. Anything that’s remotely large enough to make into a theater, it’s very hard to find. One day we stumbled on this building. It had a wonderful location on 47th Street, just a few doors west of Eighth Avenue, so it was just on the fringes of the New York Broadway area. From the street it looked like a traditional brownstone, but when you went up the stairs and past the first room, suddenly there was this gorgeous space with no columns. It had been built as a wedding chapel for immigrant marriages back in the 19th century and it made a fabulous theater with very little redoing. We added some seats and we painted everything raw umber, which is my favorite color.

TJ: Harvey designed a basic set which was a modified “enter above, enter below.”

HS: It was like Shakespeare. We did everything on that. We love to do minimal things anyway. Roadside is very minimal. We had three or four floors above it. The whole top floor was our costume room. When we did Celebration, we wanted to do a musical as cheaply as you can do it, even if it was a big show that eventually moved to Broadway. We got all the costumes free. They were things that people gave us.

TJ: (laughing) It was called “thrift shop Broadway.”

HS: Yeah, but it was a very elegant show.

TJ: It was very elegant.

HS: I decided the only way to make this look good was to do it by colors. There were five or six different sections in the show, so whatever we would get, I would do all the blues up here and nail them on the wall, and reds were over there. It was very exciting and the whole look of the show began to start happening that way. It was a real playhouse. It was great to show people through it. They were just dazzled. The building was more interesting to them than any of our shows. (Tom laughed in agreement.)

NR: What happened to it?

TJ: In five or six years, we did four shows that we showed to the public. We did a lot of others . . . Of course this was during the period of the “artsy-fartsy” ‘60s. We would have exercise classes and circus classes for our actors. There were belly dancing classes and clown mask classes. We were paying for all of this ourselves.

HS: Nobody could complain about what we did because we were paying for it ourselves. What was really great was that at the back of the theater, there was a balcony with a railing, very high up, and it opened onto this big second floor room. That was my studio where I worked all the time. I had all these musical instruments and when we did these weekly workshops, I would improvise while the actors were improvising. There were no mistakes — the more pagan the better. I would have all these instruments lying around and while I was in the throes of dramatically playing this music, I was always knocking heavy musical cow bells off. Sometimes when we had an audience we came close to killing some people. It had a “Phantom of the Opera quality” to it, with all of this dark raw umber and this person up there playing this mad music.

TJ: In all those sections, we would begin with improvisations and mask things, and then we would close with . . . (to Harvey) oh my God, how much Gallo wine did we drink? We would all sit in a circle and drink wine and it was like a group session. We’d talk about our lives.

NR: Did you run out of money or did it just go out of style?

HS: We had done everything we’d gone there to do. One of the shows, Philemon received very good reviews.

TJ: Probably the best reviews we ever got in our lives.

HS: Then it was done on the west coast by Hollywood Television Theatre. They took our cast and filmed it out there.

TJ: It got the Outer Critics Circle Award, but it’s a hard show to do well. It’s a show I like but it’s very demanding. The first part is very comedic, but the second part goes to a full human sacrifice at the end, with the same people who’d been comedic in the beginning, and then to a transcendence beyond that.

HS: I feel it was the nicest use of that building for a show. Some of the church windows that were on the side, which we had covered and painted, had platforms under each window and a different character would be standing there. It was a very formal show and very beautiful.

NR: What’s in that building now?

HS: It’s been turned into swanky apartments. I wish I had bought it but we could never find out who owned it. It got more and more mysterious.

TJ: The owners were in prison eventually.

HS: Somebody would call and say, “Meet Bobby in a phone booth at 47th and Broadway and give him the money for the rent.” Then we also got a bill one day for electricity that went all the way back to 1938. It was $95,000 and they were threatening to put us in prison.

TJ: But it wasn’t addressed to us. It was addressed to the owners who were in prison.

HS: And the back wall was about to fall down, so we decided it was time to leave.

TJ: One of the shows we did there was called The Bone Room, a middle-aged musical about male menopause. It was about a guy who glued bones at the Museum of Natural History and he was having this nervous breakdown in his life. We had this real human skeleton, so one of the last things we packed up as we moved out was this character. Also in this scene, there was a fake human skull with teeth that chattered and made a sound like maniacal laughter. Unbeknownst to any of us, it had gotten in there with the skeleton. We packed it all up. It was all taped and just as we were ready to move everything, we heard this maniacal laughter coming from the trunk.

HS: Mocking our whole existence!

NR: You two obviously get along very well.

HS: It’s like a marriage. We’ve learned to work on separate continents. You kind of learn what to avoid.

NR: What’s the best part about working together?

HS: Well, one nice thing after all these years is that we have always liked the same kind of theater and because we know enough about each other’s work, there’s a real shorthand in working together. If Tom indicates he’s going to do something, I know sort of what he’s going to do and I don’t have to worry about it.

TJ: The best thing for me is I can’t write music and I really like Harvey’s music.

NR: Is there another show in your future?

HS: There are other things I want to do before I die and I’m 72 now. I feel time is running out.

TJ: You are going to make it to the closing, aren’t you, Harvey?

HS: Yeah. I’ve had a very rich life. I want to get a book done on my whole art career. I’ve had wonderful assignments that would make a wonderful book. For many years, I did art work for Ben Bagley Recordings and I want to do a whole book of those. Then I want to write a book about my life, not that my life is that meaningful, but there have been 32 bizarre incidents that have happened in my life and I’m going to call the book “32 Bizarre Incidents.” There’s so much to do, just in taking care of what I’ve already done. I want to get my files of all the music in pristine, perfect shape and get everybody copies. I don’t want to die and leave things that aren’t clear. There’s a lot of visual stuff in our shows that I want to organize.

NR: Sounds as if you’ve got a full agenda.

HS: I do. I’ve got the big studio down there in Texas and I want to just stay there. I’ve had to travel so much the last several years. I want to work on my health too. There’s a wonderful gym two blocks from my house and they just added a huge new swimming pool. What I do is very minimal, but I want to do it. When I come up here I don’t do anything. I just eat all of the time and don’t do anything.

NR: Tom, what do you want to do?

TJ: I want to write some more shows. I’ve been working for a year or so now on a musical version of Harold and Maude. I have about three things I would like to do. Then I would really like to rest. After this show opens and The Fantasticks closes, I would like to go to my house in Connecticut. I haven’t been able to get there much this year because my kids are in school in New York. I would love to go for three weeks and never leave. I’d put a fire in the fireplace and have the family come up on the weekend. I would take my dog and walk in the snow and read. I would love to read and listen to music and sit by the fire and drink martinis.

HS: In the last number of decades, there’s been no time to do anything. I don’t ever feel I have time to see a movie. When you’re working on a show, you can never give it enough time. It’s never good enough. It’s a tunnel where the light is so distant at the end, you can barely see it.

TJ: And you can’t think about other things. I go home after the show at night and I can’t even watch television. I turn it on because I can’t go right to bed, but nothing registers. It’s not that the show is in trouble, but it obsesses you.

HS: It has to obsess you. For years people wanted me to do a recording where I play our songs on the piano. I’m dying to do that, but my fingers are getting more arthritic so there are almost no runs in anything I play anymore. I want to play before it gets very club-footed.

NR: How do you want to be remembered?

TJ: I simply don’t think in those terms. I’m not interested in that whatsoever. I’m interested in work. I’m not interested in history in that way. I’d like for my family to remember me affectionately and to feel that I did a good job.

HS: I’d like for people to remember “Try to Remember.” I’m going to put that on my tombstone. I’m going to be buried in this very simple country cemetery in central Texas where my parents are buried, and my grandparents and all of my aunts and uncles. It’s a beautiful rural church that was built and designed by my grandfather in the late 19th century. I bought his farm a number of years ago and I’d always hoped to restore that and live there but time goes by so quickly I’ll probably never get that done. I’ll be buried there but I want to design my tombstone before it happens. I want it to be in Roman type. I don’t trust anyone else to do that.

TJ: I played the Old Actor in the original version of The Fantasticks under an assumed name. On my tombstone, I would like “Remember me in light.” Maybe I’ll just write a book instead and call it that.

NR: Thank you so much.