Becoming a Broadway star.

I never had a grandfather; one was crushed in a coal mine collapse when Mom was four, and the other, after "another hopeless day on the farm," killed all his hired hands, shot Grandma, and then himself. She lived, he died. So I was left with two grandmothers--one was a witch and one was a bitch. I loved the witch.

People from miles around would come in horse-drawn buckboards to collect her and her divining rod, driving her off to their Oklahoma pastures, and she'd tell them where to drill the well. She was a "water witch" with 99 percent accuracy. She also had the county's only "madstone," so if your child "got bit" by a rabid dog, bring the little fella to Old Miz Tune. She'd draw the madstone out of the butter-milk in which it always soaked and, with strips of cloth, bind it to the bite. Poison sucked out; child lives; madstone back in the buttermilk. But enough of this background stuff, let's talk about Broadway!

It was St. Patrick's Day 1960-something when I arrived in Manhattan, driven up from Texas by the guy who probably loves me and show business more than any guy I've ever known: Philip Oesterman. Philip said, "In Houston if you dance, are talented, and extremely unusual they call you a sissy or a weirdo. In New York they call you a star. You're comin' with me." And off he drove with me in his Ford Fairlane to New York City.

Stopping on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 50th Street on that warm day in March he said, "See that newsstand, Tune? Buy yourself a copy of Back Stage and a copy of Show Business and see what's auditioning." Well, among others, there was an audition for Irma La Douce to star Genevieve. I loved Genevieve. I'd watched her on the Jack Paar show, which was the talk show of that era. Between him and Steve Allen, the talk show medium was born--God help us--and in those days talk shows were really good--and if not good they were at least brand new. Famous stars and eccentric talkers would guest with Jack Paar, and the conversations were hilarious and compelling. Genevieve was my favorite guest and I always read up on TV Guide so that I never missed an appearance. Apparently she was a poor little Parisienne who had a tiny one-room cafe on the Left Bank wherein she cooked, served, and entertained. What an adorable young woman she was, with her sexy accent and her pixie hairdo. One night she gave herself a haircut right on the show! Well, come on, what do you want? I knew what I wanted. I wanted to marry Genevieve.

So, the audition for Irma La Douce was at 2:00 P.M., Showcase Studios, Seventh Avenue and 56th Street. First New York audition; first day in the big city; I got the job! Now, that's a success story, all right, and except for one week spent as a concept coder for Young & Rubicam, I've been able to support myself in my chosen field ever since. I've danced in the chorus, I've danced in front of the chorus, I've choreographed Broadway shows, and I've directed Broadway shows. I've had a career in the theater, and I've always paid my bills. I'm so lucky.

I started in a class with all boys. Thirty minutes of tap, thirty minutes of tumbling. I was so skinny that Mom sewed little pillows inside my dance clothes so the tumbling wouldn't bruise my bones. In my first appearance onstage I was one of sixteen dormice (tumbling) and one of sixteen candy canes (tapping). I was the littlest one in class, so I was on the end of the line. For the tap number we wore white tailcoats with red-and-white striped linings. On our long flap-ball-change exit, the little boy in front of me was such a slowpoke I wanted to give him a shot of ginger in his butt. I pushed him instead and the audience laughed and clapped.

I didn't realize it was me they were reacting to till Mom told me afterward. She was laughing and saying that she would have done the same thing to give him a little "gumption." "Honey, he was slowin' up the works. Everybody clapped for you 'cause you took up the slack." I guess I've been trying to take up the slack onstage ever since.

That was on the stage of the Music Hall in Houston, Texas. It was the spring recital of the Emmamae Horn School of Dance. She was my first dancing teacher, and she had great taste and a fertile imagination and remains a huge inspiration. In fact, those "dogies" in the opening number of The Will Rogers Follies were a steal from Emmamae's spring recital of 1947. Her routine was set to "The Cow Cow Boogie," and the costumes, faux cowhide body-quits with long horns and rope tails, are almost identical to our Broadway versions. In New York at the Follies I was vilified by the feminists for those costumes. ("Women as meat? Mr. Tune, how could you?") It's all a little Texas dancing teacher's fault for inspiring me to make fun shows. Thank you, Emmamae Horn.

Emmamae and her husband, Jesse, lived a block away from our house. I was simply in love with her, and I'd hide behind the bushes to watch her do her gardening--in pink ballet slippers with pink ribbons cries-crossed around her ankles. She knew how to put on a show, and when dancing school shut down for those long, hot Houston summers I'd get the neighborhood kids together and direct miniversions of her recitals that we performed in the backyard. We charged two cents, but the lemonade was free. I didn't know about concessions then.

I wonder if the reason I've never really grown up--except physically--is because I learned to dance too soon, or because I was old before my time, so I've spent my life "youthening." I do remember going to Sheila Jones's third birthday party and Mom asking how it was. Four-year-old doubting Tommy answered skeptically: "Her said her was three, but her don't look three to me." Was little Sheila Jones trying to pull a fast one on me, lying about her age? What was I thinking in my four-year-old brain? What am I thinking in my fifty-seven-year-old brain? I have always lacked emotional maturity. "Oh, Tune, you're just an overgrown kid!" I've heard the likes of that on many occasions and taken it as a compliment. But is it? As I write this, this early Manhattan morning in Penthouse C, I find myself struggling through yet another doomed relationship. Why do I keep trying? It's all so seemingly futile. Grow up!

I always get so nervous at auditions, that terrible feeling of having to prove you have talent instead of merely sharing it by entertaining the folks. I used to think of the people out front at an audition as the enemy. Now that I'm out front a lot at auditions I have a completely different take on it. Auditionees, listen up! We out front want you to be brilliant. The sooner we get our talented cast the sooner the highly imperfect system called auditioning is finished and we can start rehearsals. The people out front are not the enemy; they are your biggest fans. "Please let them dazzle us," we're saying. "Let them be perfect." If you believe this, perhaps that could lessen the pressures of auditioning, pressures that make one put up walls of protection around one's own natural personality and gift. This pressure sometimes causes a distancing effect, sometimes creates a pushed, frantic quality that's not one's natural bent but sort of a manufactured gaiety to overcompensate for the discomfort and, yes, fear. Just know that we're on your side. As a director, I do my best to create a nourishing atmosphere for the "fragile plants to grow." I think other directors do likewise. Trust us, and do your best. Shine through.

Living is a constant process; there is no trick to it, just simply taking each moment at its fullest. There is no past, there is no future, there is only now. And right now, I'm sitting, I'm writing, I'm breathing, a plane is going over, the sun is shining, my dog, Ophie, is flopped out next to me on the sofa breathing easily, my fingers are clutching this pen with a purpose. I'm fervently seeking to communicate with you. And right now you're reading these words, you're breathing too, just like me, light is falling on the printed page. It's like that, and you add up all these observations as they occur and it's a life. It's all we have. It's all so completely simplistic, so frustratingly complex. This is not a dress rehearsal. This is the show.

I've written a book about Martha, but I have to wait for her to die to release it!" announced Agnes de Mille. It was a great afternoon. It was in her apartment downtown. We had lunch in her dining room. She had white enameled wrought iron garden furniture--glass tabletop and curlicue chairs with little cushions--I really didn't fit in them at all, but I'm used to that. Airplanes, taxis, cramped theater seats--I've learned to adapt. I'm a collapsible dancer. The silverware and china were totally mismatched, and there was a lone paper napkin stuck in a water glass. Her Jamaican housekeeper had done her best. Agnes sighed--this was after her stroke, so she was physically compromised--and said wistfully, "I used to set such a nice table." We ate; she talked; I asked as many questions as I could.

"Twenty years without a complimentary review from The New York Times has almost killed me." She spoke of her early struggles and her early successes; here was the woman who had changed the form of the American musical forever. There's Oklahoma! (Agnes de Mille), West Side Story (Jerome Robbins), and A Chorus Line (Michael Bennett). Notice the order--I'm with the pioneer. Since she came from the East, I wondered how she was able to capture the great expanse of the West in her choreography.

"Well, you must remember, my husband was a Texan." Then adding with a kittenish, lopsided grin, "and almost as tall as you."

We spoke of painting and music. I told her the story of when I was a chorus boy on Broadway making $90 a week, how I would pass by this gallery in my neighborhood and had fallen for this painting in the window. Realistically depicted in oil was a near-broken-down wooden ship, sails ripped and blowing in the wind, against a blue sky, sitting--kerplunk--in a field of golden wheat. What an image--this great ship plowing ahead and not advancing one iota. Finally I got the nerve to go in and price it, suspecting that any art was out of my range. The owner said, "Sorry, it's sold. Agnes de Mille bought it. She said it reminded her of herself."

Agnes said, "Oh, yes, I remember that painting--it was done by one of my ex-dancers, Margaret Taylor. You'd like each other. I'll make another lunch so you can meet."

Later in the afternoon she remembered that after her stroke, as her husband was lifting her into bed, she whispered, "I apologize for ruining your life." He responded, "Nonsense, Aggie, you've made me a better man."

She was back in her bed now, using a faded pink terrycloth towel to blot the spittle from the corner of her mouth that drooped since the stroke. "It's time for you to go now."

But wait, I thought, I've got so much more to ask you. Panicked that this might be my one and only chance, I begged for one more question. "You're such a good writer. How do you do that? How do you write?"

"Ah, well, now, that's hard," she said sternly. And that was it! She's right. She pulled out a small photograph of herself as a young woman and signed it to me and I was out--out on the sidewalk as the sun was setting. Here was the park she'd walked the perimeter of for a whole day and night while she conceived Rodeo. I walked the perimeter, right then and there; I had to, following in Aggie's footsteps.

A couple of weeks later I got a note from her inviting me to tea to meet the artist. "And you can bring that girl you kept on talking about (during lunch I had spoken about my current dancing partner, Annie Reinking) if you want." I couldn't, I had to go on tour with Annie in Bye Bye Birdie. I never saw Agnes de Mille again.

I've always likened putting on shows to cooking, perhaps because my father and mother both used the kitchen superbly--Mom was a baker and Dad a cooker. Both my sister and I grew up without fear of the kitchen, and some of my favorite hours on this planet have been spent gathering ingredients and preparing meals for people I love. Jane Curtin says, "The family that sautes together stays together." Cooking with my real or surrogate family is a primary source of entertainment for me.

Believing this, perhaps that's why I sometimes wear my chef's attire to rehearsals. We're simply, in making shows, cooking up food for the spirit, nourishment for the soul. The shelves in the store seem to be almost barren of fresh fixin's these days, but one can somehow always scrape together a meal for the hungry. I feel that there is still a great appetite for musical theater if we could just encourage the growth of a new crop of thinkers. I feel that the lack of writing talent starts first with our educational system, then with the fact that a heady living can be made on television serving up fast-food sitcoms each week, and, finally, in New York City, the existence of only one proper newspaper for intelligent review of our new theatrical offerings. There used to be a whole bunch of theater-loving critics stationed at our New York dailies, and a mixed bag of reviews stimulated the theatergoing public to see and judge or enjoy for itself. As daily publication after daily publication folds we are left with one legitimate source, and that has been given an all-powerful position. That is not healthy for the present and future of Broadway.

Broadway chorus boys' dressing rooms are like locker rooms. After all, like football players, basketball players, or hockey players, we're a team paying the bills with our bodies. Wearing our uniforms, sweating heavily, we put ourselves in physical peril eight times a week--definitely blue-collar work--but with notable perks--the lights, the music, the dancing. Chorus boys' dressing rooms are also riddled with humor: sarcastic putdowns of the stars ("Is it just me, or does she have a rhythm problem?"), cynical, world-weary observations about the writer ("Let's chip in and buy him a pair of scissors"), about the director ("Is it spelled P-A-C-E?"), about the top soprano ("Maybe a tuning fork would help"). Complaints about choreography and costumes and dance shoes and rehearsal hours abound, but all hurled out with a great knowing comic edge. Once I was elevated to my own private dressing room I really missed the chorus camaraderie. During the Busker Alley tour when I'd get lonesome, I'd pack up my makeup and move into a corner of the boys' dressing room. A bunch of guys in the same boat can really make you laugh. I love playing on a team.

After a lengthy road tryout of Busker Alley, with only one week to go before our New York City engagement, something highly unexpected occurred. With one minute to go in the Sunday performance--while doing the final reprise of the title song--I slipped onstage and broke my right foot. In that one musical beat, doing a step I'd done at least a thousand times, the whole future of that show changed. It makes one realize just how vulnerable we are as we tightrope-walk through our performances eight times a week. I break my foot, and two hundred people are put out of work. The backers lose their multimillion-dollar investment, and my career is in tenuous balance once again. Rumors fly in the press: I'm faking it because the show isn't any good and I don't want to bring it in (which makes me a coward in my eyes). I'm gravely ill and dying (which I'm not, but then the fact is "We're all dying, Otto"--that's my favorite line from Grand Hotel). I've been paid to take the fall so the producers can collect on the highly publicized hefty insurance policy they'd taken out on me with Lloyd's of London. And these are just some of the tall tales circulating, all completely untrue and all of dubious origin.

The truth is that I broke my foot onstage in the line of duty, being the best Broadway soldier I know how to be. Someone said that there are no accidents. If so, then I'm still looking for the reasons behind this nonaccident that befell me. It's a shock to be dancing to the extent of one's capacity on one beat in the music, and then not be dancing at all or even able to dance on the next.

What an odd, debilitating sensation it is for a dancer to suddenly not be able to dance. A bird with one wing, a horse with two legs, a tree with no roots. My whole dancing body went into trauma from the abrupt finale it suffered. What is a dancer who no longer dances? Gwen Verdon said that dancers die two deaths, one when they stop dancing and the second when they stop living.

What a mystery dancing is to me. How do the images in my head travel through my neuromusculature and come out of me in rhythmical physical phrases? How does it differ from walking, running, or skipping? Someone asked Barbra Streisand once how she held her notes so long without breathing, thus making her aware that she was doing something extraordinary and causing her to not be able to do it again for months. She told me this herself, many years ago, on the set when we were filming Hello, Dolly! Gene Kelly was our director, and he gave me the best direction I've ever been given--he simply came up to me between takes and said, "Tommy, dance better." And I did. I wonder if I ever will again.

When we lose the ability to laugh at and enjoy our differences--in fact to celebrate them--what an angst-ridden world we become. Tiptoeing around on eggshells is not a comfortable way to perambulate through life. It seems to be repugnant to giggle at even the difference between the sexes, much less the difference between the races. Because of this, I feel that the world is a pressure cooker without a release valve--no opening to let the steam out. Laughter at ourselves and with others is that release valve in our culture, and it is being stifled. It will cause another civil war. I feel it. It's just a matter of time. We can't keep the lid on much longer.

I've just now reread this and I find that I've changed my perception on a lot of the issues, and I'm remembering that that's what Marianne Williamson calls "a miracle." We're all constantly evolving, and to be a human is to change your mind. Specifically, I've brightened my outlook on my chosen field--the Broadway musical. I just attended the world premiere of a show called Ragtime that's headed to 42nd Street, and I really loved it. It's everything a musical should be. I feel that all of our show business history has culminated in this latest theatrical event. I was warmed and inspired to know that such a great musical can be created in this time span. I urge you to see it. And if I ever get to do another musical, please come see it, too. I promise you that I will have given it my all. Okay? Deal? Get out there and support your Native American Art Form!

Work aside, I've also realized that personal incidents that have weighed heavily on me throughout my lifetime don't seem very important right now. In fact, nothing seems very important to me right now except one thing--kindness. Simple, basic kindness, whether it's toward the cab driver who answers your hail and takes you to your destination, or toward your nearest neighbor by not playing your music too loudly, or to a friend by quietly understanding and responding to their silent cry for solace, or to an ex-lover by just forgiving him or her for hurting you, or to your dog by making sure he has fresh water before you go out on the town for the evening. Kindness is really important to me right now. Isn't that corny? And yet one of our greatest songwriters, Irving Berlin, said, "There is an element of truth in any idea that lasts long enough to be called corny." I hope kindness lasts. It's the corniest of all.