Marc Shaiman, one-half the songwriting team behind the Broadway musicals “Hairspray,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Some Like It Hot,” and “Smash,” doesn’t even start to tell us about any of his musicals until more than halfway through his new memoir, “ Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories from a Sore Winner” (Regalo Press, 298 pages)
The first half of that title is misleading: It’s what his mother said when wished a Happy New Year. Shaiman repeatedly calls himself an Eeyore (the depressed stuffed donkey in Winnie the Pooh), but in truth the predominant mood that comes through these pages is gleeful, not gloomy, as Shaiman recounts the promised “showbiz” anecdotes from his half century as a successful composer for stage and screen – and as a piano player, performer, lyricist, arranger, orchestrator, musical director, conductor, and, above all, an accompanist. That particular role reflects the two most persistent aspects of his character, both evident from an early age – musical talent and star-struck fan. He was a gay Jewish nerd growing up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, who put posters of his “idol” Bette Midler on the wall of his room at age 13, and “devoured” her albums; it’s astonishing that just four years later, he started playing piano for her. He dedicates the book to Midler, whom he calls at various points his “all-time favorite performer,” his best friend, his older sister.
But not his only celebrity obsession. He also has room for a chapter on the one time he accompanied Barbra Streisand, on one of her signature songs, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” an experience that, he writes, “made me truly Hollywood’s happiest homosexual.”
Shaiman devotes chapters to his friendships, and working relationship, with Billy Crystal and Martin Short, and tells anecdotes about Mariah Carey, Raquel Welch, Shirley MacLaine. He offers an entire chapter on the night he got Stephen Sondheim so high on marijuana that the older composer fell on the floor three separate times. He quotes Sondheim as saying on the phone the next day: “Just do me a favor and wait until I’m dead to tell this story.”
“Well, Mr. Sondheim, I waited,” Shaiman writes. “It was hard, but I waited.”
With only a few exceptions, his celebrity anecdotes are good-natured, even adoring. He even defends producer Scott Rudin, for whom he scored several hit movies (“Sister Act,” “The Addams Family,” “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.” “The First Wives Club”) Although he writes of some tense interactions ( “his temper was often uncalled for”) he concludes the chapter reacting to Rudin’s “cancellation”: “Complicated as he is, one cannot deny that he is a genius producer with taste, smarts, and a phenomenal track record, and I for one am glad to hear he has worked on himself and is coming back to where he belongs.”
Shaiman is not as magnanimous towards Nora Ephron, recounting how arbitrary and undermining she was when he scored her film “Sleepless in Seattle,” for which he received the first of his seven Oscar nominations, for the song “A Wink and a Smile.” At one point, she “witheringly” rejected his orchestration because, as she told him, “I just found out I don’t like oboes.” The chapter about her ends with his saying that they eventually reconciled and “I can say with all sincerity that my heart broke when she died too young” – then acidly adds: “I’m certain she is in heaven, telling all the angels she doesn’t like harps.”
Among the strongest chapters in the book are the early ones about his childhood and the precocious launch of his musical career, with the now storied tale of his meeting Scott Wittman at the Greenwich Village piano bar Marie’s Crisis when Wittman was 21 and Shaiman was just 16 years old, the beginning of a partnership that has lasted fifty years, and a romantic relationship that endured for the first twenty-five.
Theater lovers will especially appreciate the chapters on their Broadway musicals, particularly his chronicle of the making of “Hairspray,” the long-running adaptation of John Waters’ movie that won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and Best Score for Wittman and Shaiman. Producer Margo Lion had asked him to write the music, after his success scoring the similarly toned South Park movie, but wanted somebody else to write the lyrics; this fed into his “pet peeve”: “It just seems impossible for people to comprehend that I am also a lyricist” (This may help explain why “Never Mind the Happy” features the lyrics from almost three dozen songs, most of which he has written, some of which he only arranged.) When Shaiman insisted that he and Wittman do both music and lyrics, Lion asked him to audition. Shaiman recounts how the two of them get to work the very next day, Wittman telling him:
“The show should open like Oklahoma the way Curly sings of the glory of the open prairie with Oh, what a beautiful morning. But in this case, it’s Tracy Turnblad who has such a positive attitude that she can open her window look at all the flashers and rats in the John Waters version of Baltimore, and still sing about it with love and pride”
Shaiman comments: “ And off to the piano I went. This is often how Scott and I work. He is also a director, and thinks about a song with a director’s perspective. Once he sees it in his head, we search for a title, and 98 per cent of the time that title comes from Scott. So with Scott’s description in mind, I wrote a first draft of ‘Good Morning, Baltimore. “
Such fascinating glimpses into their work makes it all the more baffling that Shaiman seems to downplay his Broadway musicals in several ways. He writes, for example: “It’s understandable that the chapters in this book about Hairspray would be the lengthiest, but enough already. If you want to know more, give me a call.” His two chapters on Hairspray take up a not-at-all-excessive thirty pages, which includes four photographs. His chapters on his other musicals run to as little as six pages, some largely filled with lyrics.
In his acknowledgements page, he thanks “the two most important men in my life, Scott Wittman and Lou Mirabel. Each have loved me through thick and thin (not to mention fat and thin) and are both deserving of far more presence in this tome, but I simply had to include that Carol Channing and Mary Martin chapter, and I hit my word limit!”
He is referring to the description of his encounter with the two performers when he was hired to arrange a song for the play in which they co-starred, entitled “Legends!” which, he reports, “got legendarily bad reviews wherever it toured.” But that anecdote takes up little more than two pages, plus two photographs of him hugging each of them.
He is, in other words, joking about hitting his word limit. But it’s a telling comment nonetheless, a clue as to his priorities in the book. I’m not sure what more he needed to say about Lou Mirabel, the Navy veteran he married in 2016, with whom he has never worked. But it is a surprise and a disappointment how relatively little there is about Scott Wittman.
We do hear Wittman’s ideas, such as the one I just quoted, throughout “Never Mind The Happy” but we don’t get a solid sense of him as a person, and Shaiman doesn’t tell us why they broke up. (He writes little more than: “I won’t pretend our breakup wasn’t painful but hard as it sometimes was, we had to – or chose to – continue to work together.”) Is Shaiman’s focus on celebrity anecdotes a strategy to try to make his book more marketable, or is it a reflection of his world view, never having completely escaped his poster-plastered room in Scotch Plains, New Jersey?
The New Jersey in him accounts for much of the warmth and humor that shines through even some of his most relentless celebrity inventory, such as the story he tells of his decision to combine his wedding with a celebration of Mirabal’s retirement from the Navy. “None of my friends were going to schlep to a VFW Hall in Bogota, New Jersey for his retirement ceremony. But for a wedding? Yes, it turns out, they would schlep for that. That afternoon, one side of the room was full of Lou’s friends and family, ready to applaud his service, while the other side was a celebrity filled group, all trying hard not to let on that they knew. I don’t think the denizens of this VFW Hall ever expected to see Bette Midler, Whoopi Goldberg, Jenifer Lewis, Darlene Love, Nathan Lane and Patti LuPone among the spectators at a retirement ceremony. They must’ve thought that a USO tour showed up at the wrong address.”
