Elaine Stritch’s death, at the age of eighty-nine, marks the end of an era—the end of old-school, succeed-or-die, knock-’em-dead, Broadway show-biz. She knew better than anyone around how to work an audience, how to tell a story, how to sell a song. Did anyone sing Sondheim better? Or Coward? She carried her baggage onstage and made a swaggering show of her gutsy survival. “Elaine Stritch,” the fast-talking, loosey-goosey broad was her greatest role.
Onstage, she was all prowess; offstage, she was all panic. The lyric of a song, the stage directions of a script, gave her a sense of direction; onstage, and it seems to me only onstage, she could be free. To anyone who had to negotiate with Elaine—and I spent eleven months going toe-to-toe with her to create “Elaine Stritch at Liberty”—Elaine was a problem to herself. She knew it. She embraced it. She celebrated it. “What’s this all been about?” she asked at the end of the show. “An existential problem in tights.” And then some.
Her contradictions were as enormous as her great gift. She was marvellous and monstrous, sirocco and mistral, fragile and brutish, inspired and vacant. She could seduce an audience but she could never surrender herself, which was both her poignance and her tragedy. Onstage, she could create joy; offstage, she could inflict a lot of pain. These extremes made her memorable, compelling, and a caution.
Yet, both onstage and off, she was unforgettable. Her audacity onstage was thrilling; offstage, it could be breathtaking. “John,” she once said to me, “you gotta stop giving me these books with your signature. I can’t give ’em away.” I’ll miss her.
The account of the Lahr-Stritch collaboration can be found at johnlahr.com, along with Stritch’s rendition of Noël Coward’s “Why Do the Wrong People Travel, While the Right People Stay at Home.”
Photograph: John W. Ferguson/Getty