You don’t get to be Patti LuPone without making a few crazy memories—and on her most recent appearance on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live Monday night, the Broadway diva relived quite a few.
Cohen used several games to mine gossip from LuPone, including one in which she confirmed which rumors about her are true and which are not. One thing that is true? She definitely got kicked out of a club once—specifically, Prince’s club in Minneapolis.
“My friend was onstage performing, and she was getting booed,” LuPone said. “And I was louder than the boos, using some very colorful language, and all of a sudden there were two bouncers that lifted me up and threw me out the door.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Another one that really happened? LuPone trashing a dressing room. “I got fired from Sunset Boulevard,” she recalled. “I found out that night while I was getting ready—in London—getting ready to perform, and my agent at the time called and said it was in [legendary gossip writer] Liz Smith’s column that I’d been fired,” LuPone said. “So I... started to scream and cry, because I was at the theater ready to go on.”
That’s when things got really ugly. “I took a floor lamp and I used it as batting practice,” LuPone said. “I smashed up my waiting area and then took the floor lamp and threw it out of the second floor window. Then left.”
During another game, “Shady Lady Who Lunches,” LuPone gave her excruciatingly honest review of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats.
Drag queen Alyssa Edwards, who assisted Cohen with some of the games, asked LuPone whether she would ever watch the film, and to rate her shock at the film adaptation’s box office bomb last year. Her response? “I will never watch it. I just saw the revival of it and walked out after the first act. I saw it originally in London and hated it, so I’m not surprised that it bombed on-screen. From one to 10, how about zero?”
And finally, there were LuPone’s candid comments and memories of two other legends: Barbra Streisand and Glenn Close.
First, Cohen asked if LuPone thought Streisand will ever get her film adaptation of Gypsy off the ground. “Um that’s a hard one,” LuPone replied. “I have no idea. I know she would like to do it, and I’m sure there’s technology so that she could do it, and I think maybe 50 years ago, she would have been a brilliant Madam Rose.”
When Cohen asked if LuPone meant Streisand was too old, she confirmed she does. “There’s technology to change all that,” LuPone said, “but I don’t know whether, mentally, she has that kind of... hunger.”
But perhaps the funniest answer came when Cohen asked what LuPone and Close talked about during their trip to Bar Centrale—which seemed at the time like a sign the two might have buried the hatchet after Andrew Lloyd Webber chose Close over LuPone to take the starring role during the show’s Broadway run. Turns out, that’s not quite what happened.
“We didn’t grab drinks; she crashed our table!” LuPone said. “It was in the paper the wrong way. I was with Jon Hamm and Andrew Rannells... And Glenn came and sat next to Jon Hamm. That’s what that was about.” LuPone said she had one instruction for Jon Hamm: “I said to him, ‘If you go home and you fuck her, I’ll never speak to you again.’”
