Show Business: The Very Expensive Coco

THAT bit of advertising copy took up less than one-eighth of a page in the Sunday New York Times. But by 7:30 Monday morning, people were falling into line for a show so long awaited and so much talked about that advertising was almost superfluous. By noon, the line stretched along 51st Street, turned the corner at shuttered Lindy’s onto Broadway, headed uptown, rounded the corner again and began backing up into 52nd Street. The first day of box-office take for Coco, which starts previews next week, was a record-breaking $35,000 (at $3 to $15 a seat).

What makes Coco the hot ticket? Katharine Hepburn, for one thing. The musical interpretation of the life and times of Paris Couturière Gabrielle (“Coco”) Chanel will be Hepburn’s first Broadway performance since she played the title role in The Millionairess in 1952. Hepburn is not alone. Alan Jay Lerner did the book and lyrics, André Previn is making his Broadway debut with the music, Cecil Beaton is designing the costumes and sets, and Frederick Brisson (Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game, AIfie) is producing.

Theater-party planners, who are not exactly breaking down other Broadway doors this season, had booked nearly $1.500.000 in advance ticket sales before the box office opened last week. Not that the musical doesn’t need every buck it can get. It is costing $900,000 to stage, making it one of the most expensive Broadway productions in history.

Coco also sets some sort of anticipation record, for Brisson has been laboring over this show for the past twelve years. “I’d been fascinated with Chanel since I was ten.” Brisson says, “when I was at school in England. I was fascinated by this woman who cut her hair, smoked in public, wore pants.” Brisson approached Lerner in 1960, but they did not start work together on Coco until 1965. By that time. Chanel had seen Lerner’s My Fair Lady and loved it. “I was convinced that Lerner was incapable of doing anything vulgar,” she said last week in Paris. “These people know what they’re doing.” Still, she wonders what they find so interesting in an 86-year-old couturière. “My life is rather boring. I would say. But we’ll see.”

André Previn was enlisted, even though he and Lerner never seemed to be able to get together. “It seems to me that we wrote Coco by screaming at each other as we passed in airports,” Previn says. When they finally buckled down to it, they worked out an ego-saving shorthand to communicate lack of enthusiasm for each other’s work. “If we didn’t like something,” Previn explains, “we’d say, ‘It fits.’ That’s very polite, and it has the same result as if one of us said, That’s a piece of crap.’ ”

The Stevedore Type. When the first draft of the book was finished in the fall of 1967. Lerner decided that no one would do but Katharine Hepburn. “One performance by Hepburn in something of mine and I’d die happy,” Lerner told TIME Reporter Mary Cronin last week. He got Hepburn, although at 60 she had never sung a professional note in her life. Chanel was pleased with the selection. “She’s very very expensive, you know.” Coco confesses, however, that “I’d always thought of her as such a gendarme type—so sure of herself.” (Hepburn characterizes herself as “the stevedore type.”)

Actually. Coco would have to look far for a closer think-alike. “In essence, they’re similar.” Lerner says. “Both women are extraordinarily independent and vulnerable and feminine. Both lead lives according to their own standards.” Although she never married, Coco Chanel’s celebrated affairs kept the Continent buzzing during the 1920s and 1930s. When the Duke of Westminster proposed, her rejection was a classic: “There have been several Duchesses of Westminster—but there is only one Chanel.” She seems to have had second thoughts, however. “There’s nothing worse than solitude,” she now says, “growing old without a shoulder on which to lean. Marry, marry—even if he’s fat and boring.”

Hepburn was married briefly in the 1920s and devoted herself to the late Spencer Tracy from the early 1940s on. “I don’t think you can have too many friendships,” she once said, “and I certainly don’t think you can have too many amours. If you can wait around for someone who means something to you, it’s the most rewarding experience.” She has had a somewhat less flamboyant personal life than Coco’s, but is consumed by a Coco-like work ethic. “Look at Chanel at 86,” Lerner points out, “still pinning and ripping. I’ve never known anyone who is so totally immersed in her work as Kate.”

Hepburn has been immersed in Coco for a year—primarily to have an answer ready for the can-she-sing question. Basically, she is a contralto with a range of an octave and three notes. For the past eight months she has been studying voice in various places—rattling the walls in Manhattan, London, Hollywood and Connecticut. So totally has Hepburn plunged into this production that when the first rehearsal was called on Sept. 29, she swept onstage knowing all her lines.

Following a pattern she began in Hollywood in the 1930s. Hepburn is always one of the first on stage, works the hardest and the longest without a break, and is among the last to leave. “She’s Man Mountain Dean,” says Jerry Adler, production stage manager. “She leaves us younger folks for dead at the end of the day.” When she’s not in a scene, she perches on a staircase munching things—packets of meat and cheese and fruit she has brought from home—listening and watching the onstage action over and over.

“The only time she panics is when she’s left with nothing to do,” says Lerner, who figures she must get her energy from “simplifying her life. She has 20 pairs of beige slacks, white shirts and black sweaters. When she gets up in the morning, she knows what she’s going to wear. She never considers what she’s going to have for dinner because her cook knows she eats very simply. All the decisions that exhaust the normal person, she has eliminated.”

“Dressing up is a bore,” says Hepburn. “At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.” This spareness carries over into her profession. “Addition can make an enormously interesting artist,” says Kate, “but the elimination makes a great artist. Simplifying, simplifying, simplifying.” She relaxes by playing tennis or taking long walks. When she and Director Michael Benthall worked on The Millionairess, she used to insist that he run around the Central Park reservoir with her every morning. “It nearly killed me,” he recalls. “This time I refused. I’d have a heart attack.”

In the play taking shape at the Mark Hellinger Theater, Kate plays the Coco of 1953—the Chanel who, at age 70 and after 15 years in retirement, decided to make a comeback by reopening her salon. The plot is as simple as a Chanel suit: Yes, she’ll open; No, she won’t; Yes, she’ll open; No, she won’t; Yes, she’ll open; Yes, she opens. Her collection is a flop with the Paris fashion world, but not (aha!) with the fresh-eyed buyers from across the Atlantic. Paris may have hated the dresses, and

Gave them all the ax.

But everything’s fine

Right down the line

For Ohrbach’s, Bloomingdale’s

and Best and Saks.

There are a few adornments to the story. Through a series of flashbacks using filmed sequences shown on mirrored screens, Coco’s past love affairs are recalled. She develops a motherly feeling for one of her young mannequins and becomes one of the angles in a rather flimsy triangle involving herself, the mannequin and the girl’s lover. The Lerner script makes a stab at smart-set language, but at heart Coco is an old-fashioned musical. It stands or falls on its star and its music.

No Sweat. Of the 18 Lerner-Previn songs, eight are Kate’s, full of self-doubt, self-confidence, self-satisfaction and self-recollection. Previn has played a schmalzy Loewe to Lerner’s Lerner. As for Hepburn’s voice, Previn thinks she’s got it. “There’s been an enormous improvement just since I heard her last summer,” he says. As Adler sees it, “She’s like Rex Harrison, only she out-Rexes Rex: you never quite know when the singing stops and the talking begins.” It’s probably just as well; who else but Hepburn could make a rhyme of the first stanza of her opening song,

Turn on the Lights?

Life when you retire.

It’s better to expire

The moment you retire

You’re Mademoiselle Pariah.

Designer Cecil Beaton has drawn up only two basic sets: Chanel’s salon and her ornate, book-filled apartment above the salon. But they are mechanical marvels that split, spin, break apart and generally transform themselves from the identifiable into the abstract, depending upon the mood of the scene.

If he got by with two sets, Beaton ended up designing 253 Chanel-style costumes for the show (total costume cost: $150,000) including 11 that will be dismantled during the performance, as Coco rips them apart and starts all over again. The musical’s finale is a fashion show that features Chanel designs spanning 1918 to 1959. “It’s like a Busby Berkeley number,” says a member of the troupe. “The whole set is transformed into mirrors, platforms and rings going in different directions. Everything is turning and flashing at once.”

Beyond the Lerners and Previns and Beatons—even beyond the real Chanel —it still remains very much Hepburn’s show. Of Coco’s 2½ hours, she is onstage all but twelve minutes. Although a mellower Hepburn than the imperious Kate of earlier days, she is still tough. “I think I’m feisty!” she agrees, “but people have just gotten used to me. Now that I’ve become like the Statue of Liberty or something. Now that I’ve come to an age where they think I might disappear—they’re fond of me.” At her insistence, the theater is kept at a bone-chilling 60° for rehearsals. Last week, noticing that almost everyone in the cast was sniffling, she arrived one morning with a box of sweaters. Dumping them in her dressing room, she announced that they were for anyone who was cold.

She is just as tough on herself. She told Lerner that her singing was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. “So I’ve worked,” she says. “When you run the risk of making an ass of yourself, you want a fifty-fifty chance.”