Patti LuPone is 76 years old, a Broadway legend and kind of terrible. I mean, I love her and I think she can do whatever she wants and say whatever she wants, but she LOVES to beef with people. She’s a grand dame, a diva, a difficult woman. You either accept it or you don’t, because Patti LuPone is not going to change. To be clear, I think she sounds like a hoot and I would love to hang out with her and listen to all of her terrific gossip. But I’ll acknowledge that LuPone rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and most people probably couldn’t handle her. Anyway, LuPone agreed to a New Yorker profile and this thing is going viral for all of the wrong reasons, including her beef with Audra McDonald of all people. Some insane highlights:
She has a gift with one-liners: Ask her about Madonna (“a movie killer”) or “Real Housewives” (“I really don’t want to know about those trashy lives”), and you’ll get a zinger worthy of Bette Davis—one of her heroines, along with Édith Piaf. (“I prefer the flawed to the perfect,” she told me.) Her bluntness has made her a kind of urban folk hero. On the Tony Awards red carpet in 2017, she declared that she would never perform for President Trump. Asked why, she responded, “Because I hate the motherf–ker, how’s that?” The clip went viral.
The New York theater district: “I’m so angry at whoever choked the stem right in the middle by making Times Square a pedestrian mall,” she said. When she was starring in “Company,”LuPone would carry a bullhorn and yell at pedestrians from her car window. “It’s impossible for us to get to work,” she told me. “And I said that years ago. So I start work angry. I can’t get to my theatre, because of the traffic pattern, because of the arrogance of the people in the streets. It’s a road. Get out of the street.”
She’s angry at the rest of America: She told me, more than once, that the Trumpified Kennedy Center “should get blown up.” In the S.U.V., apropos the current Administration, she pronounced, “Leave. New York. Alone. Make it its own country. I mean, is there any other city in America that’s as diverse, as in-your-face? It’s a live-or-die city, it really is. Stick it out or leave.”
Her years-long relationship with Kevin Kline, which began at Julliard: “I took an instant dislike to him,” LuPone recalled. “He looked like Pinocchio to me. He had skinny legs, and he was tall, and I didn’t really see the handsomeness.” That changed one day in art-appreciation class, when they sat together in the back and started “feeling each other up,” LuPone said. Their turbulent on-and-off relationship lasted seven years. “He was a Lothario,” she recalled. “It was a painful relationship. I was his girlfriend when he wanted me to be his girlfriend, but, if there was somebody else, he would break up with me and go out with that person. And I, for some reason, stuck it out—until I couldn’t stick it out anymore.” Kline remembered the relationship as “fraught.” “We fought all the time,” he told me. “In the company, we were known as the Strindbergs.”
Working on The Roomate on Broadway last yar: “The Roommate” shared a wall with a neighboring show, “Hell’s Kitchen,” the Alicia Keys musical, and sound would bleed through. At her stage manager’s suggestion, LuPone called Robert Wankel, the head of the Shubert Organization, and asked him if he could fix the noise problem. Once it was taken care of, she sent thank-you flowers to the musical’s crew. She was surprised, then, when Kecia Lewis, an actress in “Hell’s Kitchen,” posted a video on Instagram, speaking as one “veteran” to another, and called LuPone’s actions “bullying,” “racially microaggressive,” and “rooted in privilege,” because she had labelled “a Black show loud.”
LuPone’s response to Kecia Lewis: “Oh, my God,” LuPone said, balking, when I brought up the incident. “Here’s the problem. She calls herself a veteran? Let’s find out how many Broadway shows Kecia Lewis has done, because she doesn’t know what the f–k she’s talking about.” She Googled. “She’s done seven. I’ve done thirty-one. Don’t call yourself a vet, bitch.” (The correct numbers are actually ten and twenty-eight, but who’s counting?) She explained, of the noise problem, “This is not unusual on Broadway. This happens all the time when walls are shared.”
On Audra McDonald: I mentioned that Audra McDonald—the Tony-decorated Broadway star—had given the video supportive emojis. “Exactly,” LuPone said. “And I thought, You should know better. That’s typical of Audra. She’s not a friend”—hard “D.” The two singers had some long-ago rift, LuPone said, but she didn’t want to elaborate. When I asked what she had thought of McDonald’s current production of “Gypsy,” she stared at me, in silence, for fifteen seconds. Then she turned to the window and sighed, “What a beautiful day.”
Audra McDonald seems like one of the loveliest people in the world, and the fact that Patti has beef with her speaks to the kind of person Patti LuPone is, not Audra. Now, do I also think Patti was possibly treated unfairly in the Hell’s Kitchen situation? Perhaps. Anyway, LuPone isn’t going to change and she isn’t going to stop beefing with everyone and everything. It is what it is!
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
