I’d never been as invested in the friendship between Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald until I learned that it was no more. LuPone was profiled by Michael Schulman in The New Yorker; Schulman trails her to the set of …And Just Like That, a Rangers game, lunch, a car ride, her apartment. LuPone is as candid in the interview as she is in that one Variety interview when she was asked why Donald Trump should see her on Broadway: “I won’t perform if he does,” she says. Why not? “Because I hate the motherfucker, how’s that?” She’s cheesing and defiant the whole time.
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It’s that candor that is her strength and her weakness. “She’s one of the city’s last living broads: brassy, belty, and profane, with the ferocity of a bullet train coming right at you,” Schulman observes. Her onscreen TV husband in the TV show Life Goes On, Bill Smitrovich, is a “thoroughly distasteful man.” Madonna is “a movie killer,” Bravo’s Real Housewives have “trashy lives.” The Trump-run Kennedy Center “should get blown up.”
Her Juilliard classmate and eventual lover, Kevin Klin, “looked like Pinocchio” until he started pulling her strings. (“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.”) The former Rangers player Ron Duguay and his current girlfriend Sarah Palin are “two of the stupidest human beings on the face of the earth.” Of big sports Jumbotrons: “Don’t tell me how I should feel.” And the sports arena fan contests that play during commercial breaks: “Too much shit going on.” Glenn Close, who replaced her in Sunset Boulevard, was seated next to her at an event years after the swap: “[Close] said, ‘I had nothing to do with it,’” LuPone tells the magazine. “I wanted to go, ‘Bullshit, bitch!’”
Is there a particular venom to how she describes her falling out with McDonald, and the unlikely role the semi-autobiographical Alicia Play “Hell’s Kitchen” played in the feud?
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