THAT bit of advertising copy took up less than one-eighth of a page in the Sunday New York Times. But by 7:30 Monday morning, people were falling into line for a show so long awaited and so much talked about that advertising was almost superfluous. By noon, the line stretched along 51st Street, turned the corner at shuttered Lindy's onto Broadway, headed uptown, rounded the corner again and began backing up into 52nd Street. The first day of box-office take for Coco, which starts previews next week, was a record-breaking $35,000 (at $3 to $15 a seat).
What makes Coco the hot ticket? Katharine Hepburn, for one thing. The musical interpretation of the life and times of Paris Couturière Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel will be Hepburn's first Broadway performance since she played the title role in The Millionairess in 1952. Hepburn is not alone. Alan Jay Lerner did the book and lyrics, André Previn is making his Broadway debut with the music, Cecil Beaton is designing the costumes and sets, and Frederick Brisson (Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game, AIfie) is producing.
Theater-party planners, who are not exactly breaking down other Broadway doors this season, had booked nearly $1.500.000 in advance ticket sales before the box office opened last week. Not that the musical doesn't need every buck it can get. It is costing $900,000 to stage, making it one of the most expensive Broadway productions in history.
Coco also sets some sort of anticipation record, for Brisson has been laboring over this show for the past twelve years. "I'd been fascinated with Chanel since I was ten." Brisson says, "when I was at school in England. I was fascinated by this woman who cut her hair, smoked in public, wore pants." Brisson approached Lerner in 1960, but they did not start work together on Coco until 1965. By that time. Chanel had seen Lerner's My Fair Lady and loved it. "I was convinced that Lerner was incapable of doing anything vulgar," she said last week in Paris. "These people know what they're doing." Still, she wonders what they find so interesting in an 86-year-old couturière. "My life is rather boring. I would say. But we'll see."
André Previn was enlisted, even though he and Lerner never seemed to be able to get together. "It seems to me that we wrote Coco by screaming at each other as we passed in airports," Previn says. When they finally buckled down to it, they worked out an ego-saving shorthand to communicate lack of enthusiasm for each other's work. "If we didn't like something," Previn explains, "we'd say, 'It fits.' That's very polite, and it has the same result as if one of us said, That's a piece of crap.' "