Remembering David
Many readers may have noticed that I’ve occasionally quoted “my buddy David Wolf.” I’m sorry that, from now on, I’ll only be able to pass along things he said in the past: David died on Wednesday at 58, as all those days of two packs of cigarettes took their toll.
I met him in September 1979 when I applied for a job at The Big Apple Report, a phone service that you’d call to hear a tape of what was going on in entertainment that night. While I was waiting for him to interview me, I heard another worker whistling “Think How It’s Gonna Be” and said to him, “Oh, you know Applause! David overheard and immediately sat down. I don’t know how we started talking about Drat! The Cat! but he later told me that, once I had showed my appreciation for it, he felt he just had to hire me. He did so because that’s what he wanted, not what he needed: David knew Broadway inside out, so he really required someone whose specialty was jazz, country, or pop. But he went with me because we spoke the same language.
He wasn’t happy with his job or his boss. “Look at this,” he said, showing me an unplugged machine. “He paid $5,000 for this, and here it sits. And what do you call someone who buys a product and doesn’t use it?” I collapsed with laughter because I got the reference to Anyone Can Whistle, in which the answer to that question is: “He’s crazy.” But the real reason David wasn’t happy was that he was on a downward spiral. Eight years earlier, he’d worked for Hal Prince as an assistant stage manager of Fiddler on the Roof, which led to his holding the same post for the original production of A Little Night Music. Then he wrote for a children’s television series called The Unicorn Tales, for which he won an Emmy. But he wasn’t terribly impressed with that award, for what he really wanted to do was write the books of musicals.
His wit impressed the people who were putting together The Magic Show, and he was signed to do the libretto. Alas, he was soon replaced because, he told me, the staff feared he wouldn’t get the job done in time. Truth to tell, they may have been right; David’s biggest enemy was his perfectionism. He’d labor over each word, second-guessing himself, rarely handing in anything because he always felt it wasn’t good enough. When Martin Gottfried came out with his coffee-table book Broadway Musicals, David wrote him a 19-page letter with 102 corrections. I’ve read that letter much more often than any part of Gottfried’s book. My favorite was David correcting Gottfried’s spelling of the leading lady of Mata Hari, from Marisa Pell to Marisa Mell. Wrote David, “Hasn’t the poor girl suffered enough?”
Being fired from The Magic Show was a crushing blow. That the show ran for years and made a fortune would haunt David forever; he just couldn’t pick himself up, dust himself off, and start all over again. Yet David only settled for the best because he believed that’s what the finest Broadway writers delivered in the Golden Age in which he grew up. He told me he so loved cast albums that every morning, before he went to school, he’d get up 40 minutes early to listen to the most recent release from overture to finale. “Which meant,” he noted, “that when She Loves Me came out on two records, I had to get up an extra half-hour earlier.” He had such respect for the work that if he were playing an album and had to be somewhere for an appointment, he wouldn’t leave the house until the song he was playing had finished. I still remember the time we were late for a show because, when I came to get him, he had just started listening to the nine-minute musical sequence “The Contract” from Gigi.
When I’d walk down the street with him and we would run into his old acquaintances from the Prince years — Patricia Elliott, Beth Fowler, Gene Varrone — I’d see their faces light up with glee. They’d inevitably exclaim, “I’ll never forget the time you said…” and then land on a particular Wolf witticism. I could give hundreds of examples from my own personal experience, but here’s a favorite: When Anna Christie was revived on Broadway, David called it Old Girl in Town. (Musical theater mavens will understand why.)
Oh, we argued. When I took him to Once on This Island, an intermissionless show that didn’t allow us to express our opinions until after the curtain calls had been taken, I purred: “It’s the best musical in town.” He retorted, “There’s a million things wrong with it.” We started arguing in our seats, then in the lobby, and continued yelling and screaming our opinions for dozens of minutes outside the theater. My girlfriend came to meet us, and I still remember the panicked look in her eye; she feared that, at any moment, we were going to pummel each other. David did suddenly raise a hand, but only to gesture “Stop.” He said, “Thanks for taking me, though,” to which I replied, “Of course ” — and then we returned to arguing vociferously. I didn’t feel, “I bring you to a show and this is how you thank me?” No. Hearing David’s opinion, which was always wonderful food for thought, was my reward.
The day before he went into the hospital on August 19, we’d had our fourth consecutive phone argument about the worth of Camelot. I still have points to rebut his points, but they’ll now have to go unmade. And what’ll I do the next time a musical phrase keeps running through my head and I can’t identify it? When I was unable to place “I’m not putting on an act, it’s an absolute fact,” David was the first person I called. He said without missing a beat, “It’s ‘Oh, Please’ from Take Me Along.” Mystery solved. But no more.
Whatever you think of my writing, I’ll tell you this: It would be worse if I hadn’t met David, who helped me so much with it. His friend Lonny Price also says, “He’s the one who constantly made me raise the bar higher.” Now, we’ll just have to do it on our own — and that won’t be easy or nearly as much fun.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
