Homeward Bound (54 page)

The marquees in Midtown had beckoned Paul for years. In late 1967 he had signed up to compose the music for
Jimmy Shine
, a Broadway show about a struggling Greenwich Village artist that the playwright Murray Schisgal had written for Dustin Hoffman. Paul's first shot at theatrical songwriting didn't last long. Overwhelmed by Simon and Garfunkel work, he stepped aside and was replaced by Lovin' Spoonful leader and songwriter John Sebastian. The allure of the theater didn't leave him, though. Still, as he often did, Paul revealed the distance between his ambition and his confidence in tones of disinterest and contempt. Speaking to Jeffrey Sweet, the theater-focused student in his New York University songwriting workshop in 1970, Paul said he could never get past the artifice of theatrical music—especially, he said, when the characters onstage burst into song in the middle of a conversation. It was absurd; nothing like that ever happened in real life. Sweet countered that it was just as unrealistic for Shakespeare's kings and knaves to chat in perfectly composed iambic pentameter, but Paul was having none of it. “If I ever write a musical,” he told Sweet, “there will be a big radio upstage, and when it's time for a song, they'll go upstage and turn on the radio, and that's where the music will come from.” Wanting to show his famous teacher a more contemporary form of musical, Sweet offered to take Paul to a second-night performance of Stephen Sondheim's innovative musical
Company
, and at first Paul seemed interested: “I might do that,” he said. Sweet gave him one of his tickets, but when showtime arrived Paul's seat was empty.

His wheel of fascination/scorn continued to spin. In 1973, Paul declared that the score of the supposedly revolutionary hit
Hair
, despite its long-haired cast, flashes of nudity, and knowing references to drugs, sex, and revolution, was a pale imitation of real rock 'n' roll. “That's because the best writers of popular songs never wrote for the stage,” he said. “Consequently you get people who did poor imitations getting the big hits.” Still, he said he was eager to get to know Joseph Papp, who ran New York's purposefully offbeat Public Theater. Maureen Orth noted similar statements in
Newsweek
a few months later, but only a few weeks after that, Paul dismissed talk about pursuing theater as “bullshit,” adding, “I have absolutely no plans for something like that.” But, he added, “I'm not saying I wouldn't be willing to do it someday.” By 1980 he put writing a musical on the very short list of projects he wanted to finish by the end of the decade.

*   *   *

That didn't quite happen, but he did settle on the Capeman murders as a subject, sketched a plot about the life of Sal Agron, and composed a handful of songs before putting the project aside to focus on the
The Rhythm of the Saints
album. Other than the Concert Event of a Lifetime shows in 1993, once
Rhythm
was done, he devoted himself to the Capeman, diving into the facts of the story: Agron's birth in Puerto Rico, the fight in the playground, his rebirth in prison, and then his premature death in the mid-1980s. Paul couldn't see why he needed to fiddle with the story. It would be as exciting as the tabloid stories that had thrilled him as a teenager and as beautiful as the music at its core. That it was also entirely true would give it exactly the kind of literary gravitas Broadway hadn't seen in generations: a murder story with huge social and moral implications.

But Paul also knew that a Broadway musical wasn't just music. It was a story and a script. Directing, set designing, casting, acting, singing, and dancing—each practice had its own traditions, rules, ideals, and vocabulary. If writing, producing, and performing music required a community of talents, staging a full-blown musical demanded the skills and commitment of an entirely different set of people working jobs Paul didn't understand, applying skills he didn't have, and enacting visions that weren't necessarily his own. For a fiercely willful man intent on not just joining but actually reinventing an artistic medium that he kind of despised, it would be a herculean undertaking. Paul knew he'd need help, but he also needed to keep enough control so that the final product would be the fully formed version of his creative vision.

Eager to consult, and possibly collaborate, with someone whose work he respected, Paul took his script-in-progress to the novelist E. L. Doctorow, whose
Ragtime
had recently been adapted into a popular and acclaimed musical. Doctorow wasn't interested in collaborating on anything, as it turned out. And after reading the “Capeman” manuscript, he had one piece of advice for Paul: throw this out and rewrite it as fiction. The facts were interesting, sometimes even thrilling, but they didn't add up to a
story
, with the deeper emotional and artistic truths that reality could rarely touch. Paul and Doctorow talked for a while after that, and Paul thanked him for his advice. But he had already mapped the stars, and he wasn't going to change course now. Still hoping to find a collaborator to shore up his story for the stage, he went to Derek Walcott, the Saint Lucian poet whose blend of formal language and Caribbean imagery had earned him a 1992 Nobel Prize and a global reputation as one of the world's best living writers. An admirer of his work, Paul had befriended Walcott in the 1980s and turned to his poems for inspiration when he was writing the songs for
The Rhythm of the Saints
. Later Paul dedicated “The Coast,” one of the most beautiful songs on the album, to the poet. Walcott, who also wrote and directed his own plays from time to time, was happy to be asked, and they started working together immediately.

They made a good creative match. Eleven years Paul's senior, Walcott had also succeeded early in life, and had nurtured a world-beating reputation ever since. A mixed-race child, one of twin boys whose grandmothers were Caribbean-born black slaves and whose grandfathers were British slave owners, Walcott was raised in opposing cultures, strung between the classical literature of his imperial grandfathers and the brilliant colors and lofting breeze of his grandmothers' Caribbean. While he proved a brilliant student as a child, the African strain in Walcott's mixed blood shamed him no end. “He had prayed / nightly for his flesh to change,” he recalled in verse. Inspired in equal measures by shame, anger, self-loathing, and self-assurance, Walcott was both an insightful observer of the world and an enthusiastic chronicler of his own life. He was still in his thirties when he wrote the explicitly autobiographical
Another Life
(published in 1973) and spoke often of the torments of writing and of simply being himself. “Caught between two races and two worlds,” wrote critic William Logan in 2007, “[Walcott] has sometimes succumbed to pride or self-pity, or to that pride indistinguishable from self-pity.” Still, when Walcott took pen in hand, all these emotions fueled one of the most illustrious bodies of literature of the twentieth century.

At first collaborating wasn't easy for either of them. Both were stubborn. Neither was accustomed to having a coauthor. The more he read about Agron, the less Walcott could stand him. Paul refused to write music to fit Walcott's verse, insisting that it had to be the other way around. When Walcott had an idea, Paul would grab his guitar and play snatches of the tunes he had yet to match with lyrics. The rhythm is too fast? How about this one? Does it sound like this melody? It was an eccentric and often creaky process, but they made it work. A reference to St. Lazarus tucked into one of the songs about Agron made Walcott realize that the heart of the story was about redemption and the progress of Agron's soul. Had his crime been imprinted on him before he was even born? A childhood visit to a Puerto Rican Santero, a priest in the blended Yoruban/Catholic religion, seemed to reveal the darkness in Sal's future, spirituality draped all over the facts of Agron's life.

Meanwhile, Paul worked on the music, writing song after song after song in a litany of styles. Doo-wop,
plenas
, rockabilly, a
bomba
, and more. As the pieces fell together, Paul happened to have lunch with his old friend, lawyer, and partner Mike Tannen, and ended up inviting him over to hear the new music and take a look at Walcott's hand-drawn sketches of the scenes they had written. It had been a long time since Paul sought his counsel, but Tannen felt obligated to tell his old friend two things: the music was jaw-dropping, maybe the most powerful set of songs Paul had ever written, but the story, he said, would be a problem. The character of Agron was unsympathetic at first and unredeemed at the end. Audiences accustomed to experiencing stories through the eyes of a likable protagonist would find it difficult to root for a character as troubling as Agron. “The whole project's on a razor's edge,” Tannen told his former client. “I can see it going either way.”

Paul wouldn't budge. For all that he valued the thoughts of his friends and compatriots, he couldn't let them push him away from what felt right. Did they think he was a pop star who had wandered out of his depth when he'd made a left turn onto Broadway? Well, he was finished with being a pop star—no more records, no more tours, no performing of any kind. To symbolize the decision, he got rid of his lush brown hairpiece, covering his nearly naked pate with either a baseball cap or, if he felt like it, nothing at all. He hated all the fuss of being a star, he said, and he was finished with doing things he hated to do. Was Paul Simon making himself clear? Forty years of stardom was enough. Take him or leave him; just don't expect him to alter a note or change a word.

*   *   *

From the sketching out of the story, the writing of the songs, the pursuit of investors, and all the way to the final curtain call on opening night, they have a way of doing things in the theater. Paul had no intention of doing them like that. Rather than make a demo reel of the songs in the score, he worked in the recording studio for more than a year, creating a fully produced album of finished songs. Rather than pursue investors with the expertise to help shape the production, he and close advisers Peter Parcher and Dan Klores, a lawyer and publicist respectively, got their seed money from investors who worked in music and television. The one exception, James L. Nederlander, came from a long line of theatrical investors and producers, but unlike most of his family members James was strictly a moneyman, with next to no experience working on a developing show. When one of his investors convinced Paul to meet with a few producers from the successful Dodger Theatricals outfit, Paul heard their advice to hire a seasoned Broadway director as an insult. “You're telling me I don't know what I'm doing,” he said. That kind of talk could destroy his confidence, he added angrily. And given the sorry state of Broadway, why would he want to let them push him into making another show just like the ones he already didn't like?

News that Paul's next major work would be a Broadway musical called
The Capeman
broke in early May 1995, pegged to the announcement that Paul would hold an open audition for teenage doo-wop singers in a talent contest with ten thousand dollars in prize money at stake. He pursued potential directors with care, seeing shows, getting in touch, visiting for a while. A lot of names came up. At one point in 1995 he sat down with Susana Tubert, an up-and-coming Argentinian director who had moved to New York in 1980. Tubert's career was on the rise following a prestigious 1991 National Endowment for the Arts directing fellowship that had allowed her to work with leading directors from the avant-garde opera director Peter Sellars to Harold Prince, who was then developing his enormously successful musical adaptation of
Kiss of the Spider Woman.
By the midnineties Tubert had staged plays and musicals at theaters across the country, most often to great acclaim. When Paul called he invited her to his Central Park West apartment to play her the
Capeman
's music on his guitar, then asked her to pull together some singers who might be right for the show. With a dozen performers scheduled, Paul, Tubert, and Walcott spent a day running auditions, and when the afternoon ended they had all hit it off. “I will see you again,” Walcott told Tubert when they were saying their farewells.

Was Tubert the front-runner to be
The Capeman
's director? Sort of, but not really. Paul interviewed other directors. He talked at length with the rebellious choreographer Mark Morris and tried to hire him to direct the play, but Morris had a dance company to run, and there weren't enough hours in the day for him to also direct an ambitious Broadway musical. Morris did agree to create the play's choreography, helping attract talented performers while also drawing fans to the ticket window. The cast would have to be almost all Latinos, primarily because the Agron family, like virtually everyone else in the show, was from Puerto Rico. Better, a nearly all-Latino show would be a first for Broadway. Finally, the city's millions of Latinos would have a big, splashy musical to tell their American story beneath the brightest lights in New York.

Paul's reputation and checkbook made it easy to woo prominent actor-singers to lead the cast: Panamanian actor-musician Rubén Blades to play the older Agron and the rising twenty-seven-year-old Latin pop star Marc Anthony (born in New York to Puerto Rican parents) as the younger version of the character. They were great additions, but also an affront to the show's eventual director, who would have to work with stars who might not fit into his or her conception of the show and its script. Paul hung on to as much authority as he could. He hired an experienced stage designer named Bob Crowley to create the sets. He hired Priscilla Lopez to play Agron's mother. He made more decisions. In the late winter of 1996, he finally called Tubert again. “I just spent a year and went all the way to Puerto Rico looking for a director,” he told her. “Only to realize that the perfect person was back in New York City.” Tubert took the job.