THE LIGHT THAT FAILED

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4083/28/

Ave atque vale
Wednesday, 25 May 2011

Joseph Brooks, 1938-2011

A week after the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn over his alleged assault of a chambermaid at the Sofitel, Joseph Brooks left his townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan, bought a carton of orange juice at the local deli, returned home, and presumably poured himself a final drink. Then he hooked up a tube to a helium gas tank, and put a plastic bag on his head.

Brooks was an Oscar winner, and a Grammy winner, and the writer of the biggest hit song of the day. I'm sure there were corners of the planet where "You Light Up My Life" didn't penetrate in the late Seventies, but they were few and far between. In 1977, Debby Boone's record of Brooks' song was Number One for ten weeks, the longest-running chart-topper since Guy Mitchell's "Singing The Blues" over 20 years earlier. It came from the film of the same name, written, composed, directed and produced by Brooks, and it was the prototype for a kind of ballad we now take for granted - not a romantic love song as that term was traditionally understood but something far more overwrought and portentous:

   You Light Up My Life
   You give me hope to carry on
   You light up my days
   And fill my nights with song...

By last Sunday, Joe Brooks was all out of hope. He hadn't lit up his life so much as comprehensively torched it. He was facing trial for over (at last count) 80 charges of rape and sexual assault, in a virtual class action suit filed by women who'd answered ads on Craigslist seeking young actresses to audition for a part in Brooks' next movie. When they arrived at his apartment, he'd hand them a glass of drugged wine and a two-page scene opening with "Oh, Joe, you're so handsome. I love you." In fairness to Brooks, that could conceivably have come from an actual script for an intended motion picture: His film of You Light Up My Life was about an aspiring actress who sleeps with the director, and on a million-dollar budget it made back $40 mil. He followed it with a film about a glamorous successful songwriter and starred himself in it, notwithstanding his stammer. His only Broadway musical, In My Life (2005), was about himself. God had a supporting role, in which He sang Brooks' TV jingles for Volkswagen and Dr Pepper.

But by the time of his death his autobiographical dramas had retreated from stage and screen to the sofa of his living room. At last count, more than a dozen "actresses" had agreed to testify that Brooks had raped them in the course of their "auditions". After being arrested and charged in 2009, the songwriter wisely eschewed Craigslist and stuck to the professionals, using Kristin Davis' escort agency, purveyor of fine prostitutes to, among others, Elliot Spitzer, then Governor of New York, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn lui-mème. Despite an apparent stroke that left him using a cane and sometimes a walker in court appearances, his appetite for young hookers was undiminished, according to neighbors. The prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal doubted the stroke was real: Brooks certainly looked gaunt and frail, but then so would you if you were running up that kind of tab with Miss Davis' gals every night.

Nor was it entirely clear how he could afford 'em. Brooks had burned through millions on vanity projects and a short-lived engagement to a woman he subsequently sued. He, in turn, was being sued by a friend who'd loaned him $1.5 million for bail, and he also faced losing his townhouse. He had two children by a Playboy model of the same vintage as "You Light Up My Life". His son Nicholas is in jail on Rikers Island awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend, the swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay. His daughter Amanda said, after the multitude of "actresses" came forward, "I am grateful to know he is finally facing the consequences of his actions and that there is some justice in the world. My father is a bully and very scary."

As one of his neighbors cheerily told reporters on Sunday, what did the guy have to live for? He was out of luck, out of money, out of friends, family, and certainly out of song. Even the hookers wanted nothing to do with him. The gulf between the vacuous anodyne uplift of "You Light Up My Life" and the sex-fiend cokehead composer still ordering up $300-an-hour prostitutes in the rubble of his life is so total as to be kind of awesome.

I met him once, in London two decades ago. He wasn't happy to see me: I'd just given him a stinkeroo of a review for his musical Metropolis. He was convinced it was great, and that his score was a masterpiece, and the show would run longer than Cats and make him bazillions. Posterity would scoff at my ludicrous judgment, and so would he - presumably from his penthouse coked up with a couple of gals, although I didn't know that at the time. He took much the same view in 2005 when Broadway critics panned In My Life, spending a million and a half of his own money on an ad campaign insisting the reviewers were wrong. Even on our brief encounter in the West End, it struck me that his self-estimation was entirely detached from reality, albeit not to the point of getting desperate actresses to read "Joe, you are the greatest lover I have ever known!" on his non-casting couch all day long. Did he make them sing "You Light Up My Life" to him?

Just for the record, from The Independent, here's my review of his musical:

-

Despite using the same poster design and a offering a lavish programme full of articles about expressionism and the 1920s, Metropolis The Musical has nothing to do with Fritz Lang's movie. Of course, the problem with Lang's expressionist masterpiece/boring old silent film (delete to taste) is that its apocalyptic nightmare is so dated. We all know that, rather than forcing us to operate machines all day long, the beckoning future offers quite the opposite: self-­reliant computers whirring away, while the masses are sedated by lesbian movies on the PornoSat video monitor. But all predictive fiction says more about the time in which it was written, so the choice for Joseph Brooks and Dusty Hughes lay between musicalising Lang's Twenties future or creating a nightmare for our own time. Instead, through laziness or incompetence, they career erratically across the decades with an all-embracing rag-bag of pop culture references.

"Where is my new robot?" demands John Freeman (Brian Blessed), a diabolical mastermind bent on world domination who, in the best James Bond tradition, wears a Nehru jacket, has a silver-topped cane and speaks in honeyed tones that, as the show wears on, veer dangerously close to the fellow who did Boris Karloff on the "Monster Mash". But he needs those robots, and he needs them now.

"I need more time," pleads the little old professor.

"Excuses, excuses," murmurs the evil mastermind. "I need new robots." In defiance of cliché, the l'il ol' prof has not been given a Mitteleuropean accent, yet he appears to be singing a bad operetta translation from whatever language Brooks and Hughes originally wrote this thing in:

   I must search
   Day and night
   Find for her
   Features right.

"Features right"? No wonder extensive excavations into the cellars of the Piccadilly were required: here is a show which plumbs new depths with fabulous unprecedented consistency, maintained over almost three hours. Has Michael White, producer of The Comic Strip, created the ultimate spoof musical? Or is Metropolis perhaps the most cunning concept musical of all - a show about a future where humanity is reduced to mindless automatons that appears to have been written by mindless automatons? Or "automatons mindless", as Brooks and Hughes would say.

In this bleak nightmare, everyone is trapped in unending darkness and ground down by a remorseless unvarying routine, and I don't mean just the audience. "Hold back the night," sings Maria (Judy Kuhn) over the body of her friend, cruelly slain in the opening number, "Don't let the darkness fill her soul". "Hold Back The Night", "Bring On The Night", "One Of These Nights", "You Are The Light" (which is either a typographical error or what passes for metaphorical variety in this score)... Whatever the titular variation, Brooks sets all his "Hold Back The Night You Just Brought On" showstoppers as stirring power ballads: Start quietly, in a tremulous voice; crash in some overwrought synth and trumps; take the key up to provide a bit of fake uplift. Meanwhile, the lyrics march on as if they're boarding Noah's Ark:

   We're the cream, we're the crust
   We're for pleasure, we're for lust.

At length the good guy, Steven, falls in love. He's just met a girl called Maria but, as that's already been written, he gushes, "Someone who's that wonderful/Must belong to someone/Shall I take a chance?" A Welsh male voice choir emerges from the shadows to warble along with Maria's latest peroration urging them to cast off their shackles and rises as free men:

   MARIA: You are the light!

   GENTLEMEN OF THE CHORUS: We are the light!

   MARIA: You are the future
   Where there is wrong
   You'll make it right.

   GENTLEMEN OF THE CHORUS: We'll make it right!

Oh, come on. Giving monkey responses to an inane singalong may be just as dehumanising as working the machines all day long, but at least it's less grueling.

Meanwhile, the Master is pondering how do you solve a problem like Maria? But, as that's already been written, he arranges instead to create a robot lookalike. "Give me power, give me heat/Human face soon complete," sings the mad Prof as green rays zap the audience. The robot Maria is identical in every way except that the Prof, his knowledge of female anatomy confined to Fifties brassière advertisements, has given her huge pointed breasts with which the poor actress's professionally accredited Equity knockers can't compete.

But now the end is near and as he faces the final curtain, the Master goes into his last stirring ballad:

   Yes! I built this city
   Out of the ashes
   From nothing but dreams.

Top of the world, Ma! But what a pity he didn't take the precaution of ordering auxiliary generators, because the workers have deserted their machines and the pressure is dropping. Metropolis is now crumbling and only a few survivors emerge blinking into a new winter of dry ice to sing about the end of the night/here comes the light/it can't be wrong 'cos it feels so right/curtain up, light the light/we got nuthin' to end but the night, etc, etc.

This is the first new London musical in more than three months and a sense of my own creeping obsolescence led me to search very carefully for redeeming features. But even the exceptionally strong singing voices only serve to underline the complete idiocy of it all, while Ralph Koltai's designs, for all the obvious expense, never shock in the way that the original movie does and the sheer amount of machinery severely cramps Jerome Savary's staging. The set is perhaps the most old-fashioned aspect of all, having arrived, long after Time and Starlight Express, three seasons too late. On the other hand, if you want an evening of amiable rubbish, then - and possibly this is the redeeming feature - Metropolis has a kind of grimly earnest, leaden magnificence. There's something oddly touching about a show so unaware of its own ridiculousness. 

from The Independent, March 10th 1989


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