Natalie Wood by Gavin Lambert

Author:Gavin Lambert [Lambert, Gavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81680-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Ethel Merman, Broadway’s original Mama Rose, meets Natalie and RJ; Sinatra is on the left. (illustration credit 5.1)

PRODUCER HAD FIRST approached Delmer Daves to direct Gypsy, but he turned it down. “I simply cannot pull for the selfish mother in this story to continually exploit her two daughters,” his memo to Warner and Trilling explained. But Leonard Spigelgass, assigned to the script, believed he could solve the problem. “Keep Rose the bitch she is,” he suggested in a memo to Mervyn LeRoy, who took over as producer and director, “a funny bitch, occasionally a warm and touching bitch—but a bitch.”

After Spigelgass completed his first draft, he met with Gypsy’s sister, June Havoc, to discuss it. “Her feelings about her mother are very deep and very bitter,” he reported. “She hates the play because she says it wasn’t true.” Although Havoc wanted Spigelgass to make it clear that Gypsy’s younger sister was only thirteen when she escaped from her mother, he objected that it would make Mama Rose “appear to be a monster. ‘Why not?’ Havoc replied. ‘That’s what she was.’ ” But LeRoy and Warner agreed with Spigelgass, and Baby June becomes sixteen when she leaves the nest.

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