How to Explain Trump’s Love for the Musical “Cats”

The news, emanating from the Trump aide Stephanie Grisham’s new tell-all book—one more entry in an ominous series in which people close to Trump reveal that he is just as awful as he seemed, news that they somehow chose to keep private (you couldn’t really keep it secret) until there was a book to put out—is that Trump, in addition to having a horrible temper, a mean mouth, and contempt for women sufficient to send a Democratic politician into exile, loves Broadway show tunes. There was, it appears, a “Music Man” in the Trump entourage, dubbed, presumably, after the famous 1957 show—which won the Tony for Best Musical in preference to “West Side Story,” a thing still thought scandalous by some—and that person’s job was to “soothe” Trump by playing tunes that he loved from cast albums that he likes, particularly “Memory,” Grizabella’s song from the original New York production of “Cats.”

This news, even more than the stuff about placating Putin or the North Koreans, seemed, for lovers of Broadway music, to be the last straw, or final aria. Trump’s need to be soothed by Broadway music degrades both the office of the Presidency and a great American institution. It’s hard for those of us in New York for whom, as the above Tony memory suggests, the details of Broadway musicals are almost uncomfortably well remembered, to decide which is more shocking: the disquiet of learning that the Broadway tradition is some kind of mental pacifier for Trump, or the knowledge that Trump confirmed what people who don’t like show tunes have always thought about show tunes—i.e., that they are what people like Donald Trump like. Tragically, this is what we have come to: a critic must somehow jump to the defense of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The first consolation one might reach for is that “Broadway” seems to be used somewhat narrowly in Grisham’s telling, meaning not the work of Rodgers and Hart or Stephen Sondheim but, precisely, the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. One could make a case—one has made a case—that Lloyd Webber descends more truly from the pre-Broadway operetta traditions, adulterated with some prog-rock clichés, that conquered Broadway only in the absence of real American song making. In the case of Trump, one would acquit the American theatre of responsibility and land on the larger point: that operetta and autocracy have often had an intimate relation. Hitler’s favorite music was not only Wagner’s, much as he approved of that intellectually, but the echt operetta “The Merry Widow,” of which he could not get enough.

One might even, on this line, distinguish an actual love for the best of Broadway from the decadent love for operetta, discriminating Trump’s apparent additional love of “Les Misérables” from John F. Kennedy’s affection for Lerner and Loewe’s great “Camelot,” which his widow said he listened to every night before bedtime. (This may well have been an invention of Jackie’s, taking an event that, likely, she made happen once, and turning it into one that J.F.K. made happen often.) For that matter, one could cite positively Richard Nixon’s affection for the music of Richard Rodgers, particularly his score for “Victory at Sea”: “I sit here by the hour and listen to that album,” he said once. (Nixon was, like it or not, actually a fine musician, who joined Duke Ellington at the piano when Ellington was invited to the White House.)

Yet “Cats,” with its sturdy T. S. Eliot foundation, is in truth a rather winning, if bizarre, product of the early eighties—not unlike Trump himself in his larval, less poisonous form—and one need not be a fan of operetta to see the musical as a singular accomplishment. Forging a path through this bewilderment, it seems meet, as our grandfathers might have said, to meet with the seeming subject herself, Betty Buckley, who famously sang the song that became Trump’s improbable sedative. Fans of the singer-actress know that she has long been waging a war on social media against the appropriation of her song by the Trump campaign, which has treated her demands to cease with the same contempt with which it treats every other kind of subpoena or, for that matter, other legal demands (from Tom Petty’s estate and the Rolling Stones) to desist playing music by people who presumably despise him and what he stands for.

Reached at her ranch in Texas, where she spent the pandemic isolating and riding cutting horses, Buckley—a champion talker, expounder, and narrator of backstage stories, and that in the highly competitive Broadway soprano division—had a significant tale to tell about the song, whose appeal to Trump has so long mystified her. She recalled in exquisite detail the long ramp up to permanence of the song. “The role of Grizabella is really a tiny one, but it had a huge impact onstage—in fact, its only function is to stop the show! If you don’t stop the show, you haven’t done the song! So, when I was asked to audition for the show, I felt confident. We’d all heard the cast album [of the London version]—heard Elaine Paige’s version of ‘Memory’—but the photos make it look like, oh, weird cats on some other planet. Nobody knew what the story was unless they’d flown to London to see the show.

“Still, I was a huge fan of Trevor Nunn—‘Nicholas Nickleby!’ The artistry was divine. And it turned out that Andrew [Lloyd Webber] had come to see me in ‘Promises, Promises.’ So I did my first audition, and they passed because, as they told my agent, I radiated health and well-being and they needed a girl who could radiate death and dying.” She laughed. “That’s a hard one to get past. But I had been studying with a wonderful voice teacher named Paul Gavert, and I knew I could sing it and had the powerful feeling that it was my turn. So—even though they’re auditioning everyone—inside, I’m, like, ‘I’m Grizabella. They’ll be back.’

“Six months later, my agent calls and says, ‘They want to see you tomorrow again for “Cats.” ’ So I go in and sing ‘Memory.’ Trevor comes down to the lip of the stage. ‘More suicidal! More suicidal!’ he says. And then I sing it again, and again: ‘More suicidal! More!’ A third time, and this time he looks really dubious, Andrew’s there, everyone’s there, he still looks in complete consternation. And I said, ‘Can I speak to you? I understand you’ve been auditioning a lot of people for this role, but nobody can do it better, and . . . it’s my turn!’ He looked at me, like, What? And my agent said at lunch, ‘When are you going to learn to keep your mouth shut? He’s a British director, and he doesn’t want to know what some girl from Texas has to say.’ Two hours later, I had the part.”

In rehearsal, however, and even well into previews, she admits that she couldn’t find a way to push the song past the polite-applause barrier. “I was terrified, terrified, terrified. Like that Dallas Cowboys kicker, what’s his name, who started choking on extra points. So Andrew called a special rehearsal and made me do it again. ‘Plácido Domingo was at the show last night and he said, “Tell the girl to just sing the song,’’ ’ he said. I am just singing the song, I thought. What is he talking about?

“So I began to think, All the cats represent people—and Trevor kept saying that Grizabella is like Marilyn Monroe, she went too far, too much sex, booze, and drugs and catnip, she’s older and dying. . . . She’s lost her beauty and so I’m playing it that way, super-sad. But this is the early eighties, right? When New York was just beginning to have a homeless problem. And so I began to follow homeless people—women my age, women who were like me—trying literally to interpret them. I was playing it pathetically—but what I saw instead on the streets were women really trying to hold on to their dignity, so their self-presentation was all dignity and grace. ‘Don’t pity me!’ their eyes said. One woman on my block approached me once, and she’s walking like the most beautiful thing in the world, exactly like Grizabella, white, pasty makeup with red, red lips all smeared; she’s wearing coats and sweaters in layers and layers. Watching her, I saw her float down the street in the most graceful way and look at me directly—her eyes were clairvoyantly blue—and they said, ‘You don’t have time to talk, and neither do I, but maybe another time.’

“So I tried to internalize that look. The opposite of dragging myself around the stage and acting like a pitiful being. I intuited my way through the experience. And two previews before opening night, when I did the full version, the eleven o’clock . . . there was this breathless, stunned silence in the theatre. And the house went nuts! Trevor says, ‘That’s what I meant!’ For me, the lesson was, I acted the opposite of the direction—not stage pathos but dignity! At the song’s climax, I was looking directly in the eyes of the audience, and I felt, We’re all in this together.”

It was, in other words, her study of the precarious poise of the abject that made the song work on stage. It was also, arguably, what gave her version its enduring subtext of both resistance and resilience. Of course, it’s eerie, and even beyond eerie, to think that the increasingly inequitable conditions of New York in the early eighties, when Trump came to his first fame as an unabashed representative of the then new greed-is-good culture, was the source of the emotional power of the song that he finds most soothing.

What Trump is soothed by, perhaps, is not the sentimentality of the song alone but a tensile line of steel to which, Buckley thinks, conceivably with undue generosity, he may even be unconsciously sensitive. “Saying they used that song to calm him down! In his rages. It helped me understand what’s baffled me about its appeal to him. The literal aspect of it is about this old cat who’s dead and dying—but beneath the beautiful music and beautiful poem is such a longing to connect! So, like, Trump was a handsome kid, but his dad was a bully, so he became a bully, just trying to impress Daddy. I can’t win with charm, he thought . . . and he’s always felt outside. In his heart of hearts, there’s this tremendous need, an insatiable need, to be loved, the love he never received from his father or mother. So that is in that song: that incredible longing to belong, to connect, to not be rejected, that’s what this whole thing is. All these years, I had no clue why that song touched him, but now, with this book . . . I get it, I get it!”

Within this scherzo point lies a serious one. As some of us remarked a long time ago, Trump’s indifference to the wonders and glories of American music is not an oddity but a symptom of what a parched version of the country he supposedly holds in what passes for his heart. He has hardly any idea of what ever made America great. There is a genuine pathos in the vision of a man who has achieved power but remains unreconciled to himself, who soothes his way past his own rages and agonies by listening to the song of a homeless alley cat. The harm that tyrants do is incalculable—but the misery that they keep enclosed inside is always incredible, in the literal sense of being so large that it is hard to believe.

Betty Buckley has a somewhat more cheerful conclusion to draw from this strange pas de deux. “Now that we know that show tunes work, I think the government should start a special Broadway commission—send us singers to all the hot spots, to every dangerous dictator to keep them contained . . . or else exile them to a desert island where Broadway show tunes play on a loop all day long, until they’re inundated in Broadway music, until they’re cured.”