Theater Geek Page 13

  Glenn Close, Joan Lunden, Meat Loaf—they all sent their children to Stagedoor Manor in the ’90s. Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler did, too—dropping his daughter Mia off in a white stretch limousine. Richard Dreyfuss famously requested permission to drop his kids off in a helicopter. (Denied.) Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard’s daughter (who starred in 2009’s Terminator: Salvation), was a camper in 1996. “I remember there were mothers on the first day of camp who said to their children, ‘Become friends with her and her dad will put you in a movie,’” Bryce recalls. “That’s been everywhere. But it was more heightened at Stagedoor. Natalie Portman and I were playing opposite each other in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And she was a bit protective of me. She told me, ‘Hang with this group. This group is very real. They’re not going to try to use you.’”

  Kim Grigsby, later the music director for Broadway’s Spring Awakening, was the music director for a handful of shows at Stagedoor Manor in these years, and once worked with a Page Six–worthy cast.

  Natalie Portman and Bryce Dallas Howard starred in a 1996 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The director, John Stefaniuk (now the associate director of Disney Theatricals’s The Lion King), remembers Natalie’s dedication to her craft. “Her character had fallen asleep in the woods,” he says. “In rehearsal one day, Natalie rolled around in the mud to prepare for the scene.”

  “I had Jacob Bernstein and Jennie Eisenhower in the same show,” Kim says. “That’s Nixon’s granddaughter and Carl Bernstein’s son—on the same stage. I was sitting in rehearsals and thinking, Does anyone else see the irony in this?” (In a phone call, Nora Ephron doesn’t mention the potentially awkward business of running into a Nixon in Loch Sheldrake. Rather, she offered this: “Stagedoor Manor is an amazing place, but it’s not easy to get to. I always say to my friends with young children, ‘Pick a camp within an hour of New York.’”)

  Elsie Samuelson, for her part, may have been tickled by the well-known surnames passing through Stagedoor Manor in the ’90s, but she didn’t suffer any delusions that these celebrities were any better than the rest of us. Her job was still the same: to take care of the children. And in the same way that gay teenagers came to Stagedoor to escape the struggles of their suburban reality, so too did the offspring of celebrities. “I came to Stagedoor for all nine weeks,” says Bijou Phillips, daughter of John Phillips (of the Mamas and the Papas). “My dad had a liver transplant when I was nine. He had cancer. He was in and out of the hospital. I was going through a rough time at home.” One summer, when John Phillips showed up stinking of alcohol, Elsie gave him a stern talking to. “Elsie was appalled,” says her son-in-law, Jonathan Samen. “How he could do this to this poor child. In the offseason, Bijou used to call Carl and Elsie at all hours of the night.”

  There was a parallel story going on. “Stagedoor Manor was the island of lost toys,” says Eric Nightengale, who worked at the camp in the ’90s. “Kids who were ignored. Kids who had no community in their high schools. They came to Stagedoor. They were desperate to be challenged, and have someone ask more of them than was being asked of them anywhere else.”

  For a generation of campers, Carl and Elsie Samuelson were surrogate grandparents. “Carl was like Fred Flintstone,” says Gordon Greenberg. And had his own catchphrases. Good things were “huge.” Productions weren’t great, they were “monumental!”

  And like all grandparents, Carl liked to be the hero.

  When Jane Ohringer, an early camper, opened on Broadway in 1978, in the original company of Evita (playing Perón’s mistress), Carl somehow scraped together the money to buy out an entire row of the theater. With the large-scale success of Stagedoor Manor came more generosity. When Jon Cryer opened in Torch Song Trilogy in 1985, Carl took fifteen people to Sardi’s for dinner to celebrate without thinking twice. “You never saw a check when you were with Carl,” says David Quinn, an early camper and close friend of the Samuelsons. “But it was more than that. You didn’t feel like the restaurant was even charging you.”

  On show weekends, Carl would throw these parties in the cafeteria in honor of the camp’s chef, Jack Ruyack. “You’ve never seen a spread like this,” says Carl’s daughter Cindy. Key lime pie. Chocolate cake. “It was like Willy Wonka on steroids.” The cook—beloved by everyone—would appear in his white coat to press the flesh with parents. But Jack Ruyack didn’t actually bake any of these desserts. They were brought in from local shops. Carl just wanted him to have his moment. “Carl is the one who solved your problems,” says Barbara Fine Martin, Stagedoor’s highly respected director (a woman who handles every nonartistic detail of the summer so that the creative types are free to do their jobs).

  Carl was a larger-than-life figure in the local Liberty, New York, community, too. In the late ’90s, Paul Kasofsky (who sold carpet to Stagedoor Manor for years) was building a small shopping center; the plans called for an ice-cream parlor, a Laundromat, and a car wash. But the project was behind schedule, and Paul faced some cash flow issues. Carl owed Paul $2,200 for some carpet that had just been delivered to camp; without prompting, he cut Paul a check for $12,200—an interest-free loan. Paul returned the money immediately with a note that said thanks, but no thanks. “Still, what Carl did was more important to me than the money,” Paul says. “It showed we had a wonderful friendship.”

  Still, like any parent, there was a dark side to Carl. Michael Larsen (who taught at the camp for some twenty-four years) suggests Carl was the type to use his generosity as a cudgel. And he’d pit staff members against each other simply to remind people who was in charge. When Michael was considering leaving Stagedoor in the wake of Jack Romano’s death, he approached Carl to talk it out. “Carl would say to me, ‘We’ll miss you, but we’ll get along just fine without you,’” Michael recalls. “But Elsie, she was one of the great women of the century. She was like Beatrice Arthur. After I played a show, Elsie would take my hands and say, ‘Oh, what you’ve given us!’ Sometimes you need to hear that. And I never heard it from Carl.”

  Jonathan Samen, Cindy’s husband and a well-respected lawyer in Boston, confirms that view of Carl. This man may have been handing out the checks, but it was Elsie who was pulling the strings behind the scenes. “Without saying too much,” Samen says, “Carl’s best qualities sprang from Elsie. She was telling Carl what to do. She was the heart and soul of the place. She was the conscience of the camp.”

  To remember Elsie is to remember a funny story, says Barbara Fine Martin.

  Elsie was the bad cop to Carl’s good cop. One afternoon, Elsie grabbed the camp’s public address system and shouted into the microphone, “So-and-so to the office.” Elsie thought she’d taken her thumb off the broadcast button, but she hadn’t. And so across Stagedoor’s campus one could hear Elsie mutter, “I hate that little bitch.” In 1995, another child came to the office begging Elsie to open the canteen so he could get some ice cream. “If you don’t open the canteen,” the boy said, “I’m going to shoot myself!”

  “Get the gun,” Elsie said. “I’ll help.”

  Barb describes Elsie as “cotton surrounded by copper wire.”

  “She was a crab,” says Drew Elliott. “But you could turn that scowl into a smile in two seconds.” It’s worth noting that while Elsie cared for Bijou Phillips with her whole heart, it was not to the detriment of all others. When push came to shove, Elsie kicked Bijou out of camp for a host of offenses, including robbing the canteen. (There are no hard feelings. To this day, Bijou will get drunk with Stagedoor friends and make them run through full sections of the Our Time Cabaret. “It’s embarrassing,” says Drew, who doesn’t drink but still humors her. “She made me do the ‘What a Country’ dance at this fancy restaurant, Prana, in Las Vegas—for fifty people.”)

  Elsie had her own desk in the camp’s office, where—dressed in her bejeweled track suits—she surrounded herself with postcards from former campers. She’d sit there, filling out her TV Guide crossword puzzles, perched next to her famous candy dish.
Elsie had a sweet tooth, but the dish was really a ploy to get the kids to visit her. Children would come to grab a piece of candy, Elsie figured. And if they were homesick or in trouble, sooner or later they’d let slip what was really on their mind. Happy or sad, Elsie could see for herself.

  Elsie Samuelson behind her desk in the camp’s main office. “Parents felt comfortable sending their kids to Stagedoor,” says Elsie’s daughter, Cindy Samuelson, “because they knew my mother would take care of them like her own.”

  David Quinn grew up in Great Neck, Long Island. His father was a diet doctor—one of the first, really—until, that is, the feds came to investigate his practice. David’s father dropped him off at Stagedoor Manor one summer, said “See you soon,” and disappeared for more than two decades. Elsie, in many ways, adopted David. “This is your home now,” she told him. When another camper, Pam Fisher (now an agent at Buchwald & Associates in Los Angeles), lost her mother, Elsie sat next to Pam at the funeral. Elsie turned to Pam, took her hand, and said, “I’ll be your mother now.” And Elsie followed through on every promise.

  “If Carl was larger than life,” Konnie says, “Elsie was ten times bigger. Everybody adored her.” And famous or infamous (the mobster Joey Gallo’s daughter attended Stagedoor), talented or not, Elsie welcomed them all.

  One summer in the mid-’90s, Ellen Kleiner gave a campus tour to a conservatively dressed woman and her daughter. “It looked like they’d just come from church,” Ellen says. Anyway, Ellen was talking up the facilities, explaining about the food and such at Stagedoor, when a curious boy dressed in fishnet stockings, short black shorts, a studded wrist cuff and a matching collar turned the corner. “He was also wearing perfectly applied women’s makeup,” Ellen says. “As if he was going to a formal affair. And he was gorgeous!” Ellen wasn’t sure what she’d say to this mother if she asked for an explanation. Luckily, the moment passed without incident. Ellen handed this woman and her daughter a Stagedoor brochure and sent them on their way. Meanwhile, back in the office, Ellen, still laughing, relayed the story to Elsie—who grabbed the microphone to the camp’s PA system and screamed for that boy to come down to the office. A minute later, the kid in the studded collar appeared in the doorway, asking: “What’s wrong?”

  Elsie stood there, with her hands on her hips, and looked this boy with the perfectly applied cosmetics up and down. “Take off the fishnets!” Elsie said.

  “That’s it?” Ellen Kleiner says now, laughing. “The fishnets?”

  Elsie was not exactly progressive. This is the woman, after all, who used to go to dress rehearsals for the Our Time Cabaret to make sure the hemlines on the girls’s skirts weren’t too short. What this story is about, really, is that particular boy and Elsie’s need to protect him from the world. “That boy in fishnets came from a very religious family,” Barb says. “Elsie knew that to tell him to take off the makeup and the regalia would have destroyed him. For Elsie, removing the fishnets was a compromise.” He could be himself at Stagedoor. The sad coda to that story is that when the boy’s older sister later asked him if he was gay, and he answered that he thought he was, she lashed out: “If you ever say that again I’ll never let you see your niece and nephew.”

  “That boy never came back to camp after that summer,” Barb says.

  In 1993, Elsie Samuelson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer—an aggressive, difficult cancer to treat. The doctors gave her just a few months to live. But they underestimated her resolve. Elsie underwent an operation and the cancer went into remission. She thought she was out of the woods, but in 1999 the cancerous cells returned, multiplying at an alarming rate. Elsie underwent several rounds of chemotherapy and was certainly in pain, but she wasn’t one to burden others with endless talk of hospitals and treatments. Instead she talked about traveling, and where she and Carl might go next. She talked about her grandchildren (Cindy’s kids, now campers at Stagedoor, whom she’d call down to the office every evening for a goodnight kiss). Elsie continued to go antiquing. She loved to buy presents. “She liked to collect things,” says Jonathan Samen. “She wanted me to have a collection, even though I didn’t want a collection. She started buying me little statues of lawyers from around the world. She bought me a little barrister from Italy.”

  “But she was dying,” Konnie says, “and she knew it.”

  As the disease worsened, support came pouring in from unlikely corners. When Elsie stopped eating—a side effect of the chemotherapy—the owner of Frankie & Johnnie’s Restaurant in nearby Hurleyville (it was one of Elsie’s favorite establishments) sent over trays of food, night after night, hoping the smell might tempt Elsie to at least take a bite of something. Others responded similarly. For years, Elsie used to go to Zikaren’s, a restaurant supply outfit nearby camp to order paper goods and cleaning supplies for the summer. “She would tell me about the shows,” says Shirley Zikaren. “She talked about the camp. She and Carl worked at that business. It didn’t just happen.” When Elsie grew too sick to make the ten-minute drive to Zikaren’s, Shirley came to Elsie.

  Elsie had bouts of strength. She underwent an experimental form of treatment for the cancer, developed by Dr. Gregory H. Ripple in New Hampshire. “There was always the hope that she would dodge this,” says Jonathan. “That she’d be one of the lucky ones.”

  “She had thumbed her nose at every medical doctor’s assessment of what her future was,” says Pam Fisher. “But she was suffering at the end. She couldn’t fight anymore.” In their last phone conversation in the winter of 1999, Konnie said to Elsie: “In case you don’t call again, don’t worry. I’ll take care of the place. And the candy jar.”

  On November 26, 1999, Elsie Samuelson—the camp mother, Carl’s devoted wife—passed away at age seventy-two. Her funeral, held three days later at the Rye Community Synagogue, drew a fifty-five-car procession. “I don’t know how the word even got out,” says Debra. “We told people not to come. That was the line: ‘Don’t come.’”

  A memorial was held at Kutsher’s Hotel & Country Club on July 23, 2000. Julia Murney sang “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” Members of the Our Time Cabaret, from all different eras, performed together. Barbara Fine Martin, the camp’s director, spoke. It was a particularly moving tribute; in a camp of extroverts and performers, Barb was the least theatrical, the one behind the scenes, the motor that kept the place running. But she spoke beautifully of Elsie, whom she would always remember sitting behind that desk in the office. For twenty-five years, Barb said, people had come to the camp office, and their eyes immediately went to Elsie’s desk. “She’s done more than most of us have in this life,” Barb said. “She carved out a corner of the world. That corner in the office is Elsie’s place.”

  After an often-teary two hours, Carl (dressed modestly, and clearly moved) made his way to the stage. There was a standing ovation. “I haven’t prepared a speech,” Carl said, pausing to collect his thoughts. He told a story instead: One night, he and Elsie had gone to Brown’s Hotel to see the Our Time Cabaret perform. Elsie was beaming that night, he recalled, and she was applauding the loudest. An old lady at the next table noticed and leaned over, asking Elsie, “Which of the children is yours?”

  “All of them,” Elsie replied, without hesitation.

  “Elsie tolerated me for forty-nine years, five months, and twenty-six days,” Carl said at the memorial. “Neither one of us is perfect. What we got from you guys is perfect.”

  In the wake of Elsie’s death, Carl largely retreated from the camp. He’d sit at his desk, he’d kiss his granddaughters hello, but he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day in any substantive way. He didn’t need to be. Stagedoor was a well-oiled machine by this point. Enrollment was way up. And Todd Graff’s movie Camp, based on his experiences at Stagedoor Manor, was released in 2003, only upping the camp’s Q-rating further.

  That same year, the filmmaker Alexandra Shiva came to Stagedoor Manor to film a documentary. In an hour-long interview, Carl reflected on his life at Stagedoor.
“If you do something you love, you’re not working,” he said. “I haven’t worked in forty years.” He appeared content, but the interview was tough for him in parts. Carl was ill himself. He’d had a pacemaker implanted earlier that summer, and he was having trouble breathing.

  On April 20, 2004—five years after Elsie passed away—Carl suffered a stroke. Internal bleeding led to death. He was seventy-seven years old. Another memorial. Another devastating heartbreak.

  Suddenly people were asking: What would happen to Stagedoor Manor?

  Just as Jack Romano’s death seemed fated—the outspoken, controversial teacher dies just as political correctness is settling in—it is fitting that Carl Samuelson passed away in 2004, just as the country was going down a rabbit hole. American Idol was strengthening its death-grip on pop culture, teaching kids that fame and fortune were not just imminent, but somehow owed to them. Entitlement was the prevailing attitude. “We get a lot of kids who want it now,” says Barb. “They see American Idol—where it all happens in twelve weeks and boom! These kids say, ‘This is my second year at camp and I want my head shots. And where can my mother get an agent for me?’ I see a lot more of that than I used to. In the older days, the kids were happy to have a place to perform.” But these reality show narrative arcs are now in their bones.