How Artists Respond to AIDS

By RICHARD CORLISS

Madonna strode onstage, and 15,000 fans went bats. "It feels great to be in a house full of people who care," she told the Madison Square Garden crowd. "AIDS is a strange and powerful disease. But we're more powerful." Then Madonna, who lost her "best friend," Painter Martin Burgoyne, 24, to AIDS, rocked the Garden with old songs given pertinent twists. As she sang Papa Don't Preach, the screens flashed Ronald Reagan's image; at song's end, they bore the message SAFE SEX. Everyone got the message from the concert, which raised $400,000 for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR), and from a comic book about AIDS. "Read this booklet," a handwritten note urged, "then give it to your best friend. It just might save his or her life. It just might save your own. Love, Madonna."

That same night last week, another Manhattan audience gathered for a more poignant celebration. Charles Ludlam, the wondrous star-playwright-designer- director of Greenwich Village's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, had succumbed to AIDS in May, at 44. Now 1,000 of his admirers crammed into the Second Avenue Theater to watch excerpts from his ebullient farces and to pay tribute to the artist whom Playwright William M. Hoffman called "the funniest man in America." Madeline Kahn recalled her college days with Ludlam. Joseph Papp and Geraldine Fitzgerald spoke of his prodigious energy. Finally, Everett Quinton -- Ludlam's colleague and for years his lover -- walked onstage to a standing ovation. Throughout the evening he had manfully cavorted through such roles as Flosshilde in Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, Alice in Conquest of the Universe or When Queens Collide and Lamia the Leopard Woman in Bluebeard. He waited for the cheers to subside and said, "I never felt so alone in my life."

Hope, pugnacity, desperation. And the entertainer's belief that, against fatal odds, the show must go on. These may be the only emotional weapons an artist can marshal against a disease that has sapped America's artistic community. Star-studded evenings like the Madonna concert and the Ludlam memorial have become depressingly frequent occasions for New York's beau monde. In October, 13 prominent dance companies will appear in Dancing for Life, which should raise $1.5 million for four AIDS groups. In November, Leonard Bernstein, Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price and other luminaries will stage a Carnegie Hall concert to cadge $2 million for the Gay Men's Health Crisis.

When artists are not rallying the well-heeled troops, they are struggling to transform their feelings about AIDS and its sufferers into art. Theater has already produced a shelf of contentious dramatic literature: Hoffman's As Is, Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, Harvey Fierstein's Safe Sex, Robert Chesley's Jerker, or the Helping Hand, Alan Bowne's Beirut. The D.C. Cabaret Troupe is performing its new musical, A Dance Against Darkness: Living with AIDS, in Washington. NBC broadcast the first AIDS TV movie, An Early Frost, in 1985, and this week CBS airs An Enemy Among Us, in which a teenager gets AIDS from a transfusion.

Hollywood, ever cautious, has yet to make an AIDS film, although The Normal Heart may soon be produced by Barbra Streisand. Nor have rock musicians, trapped in machismo, done much to raise money and consciousnesses. In pop music, that is mostly women's work. And women, like Madonna, are doing splendidly. Dionne Warwick's megahit single That's What Friends Are For raised more than $1 million for AMFAR. Cyndi Lauper's royalties from Boy Blue, about a friend who died from the disease, will go to New York City AIDS research and patient care. Says Elizabeth Taylor, a ferocious fund raiser for AIDS research: "Since we began fighting this tragic disease, the most loyal, courageous support has come from the artistic community. The irony is that AIDS has decimated the arts, and every day we lose some of the greatest talent of our time to this hideous disease."

The roll call is heartbreaking. Broadway's top musical showman, Michael Bennett, dead last month at 44. Manhattan Art Dealer Xavier Fourcade, 60. Fashion Designers Willi Smith, 39, and Perry Ellis, 46. Makeup Artist Way Bandy, 45. Charles Ward, 33, who left the American Ballet Theater to go Dancin' on Broadway. Production Designer Bruce Weintraub (Prizzi's Honor), 33. Allan Estes, 29, founder of San Francisco's Theater Rhinoceros. An appalling 27 deaths in the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. To list them and their dying or dead brothers is to compile a journal of the plague years.

The plague carries its own stinging stigma, in that most AIDS victims have been homosexual males. Thus there is ambivalence among artists when the media disclose deaths caused by AIDS. Is the press spreading information or incrimination? Further, artists do not die only of AIDS, and the disease does not kill only artists. Says Hoffman: "I was going through my address book the other day to see who was gone. Among the 16, there was a plumber, a computer genius, a cop. AIDS attacks a cross section of humanity. But artists get the notoriety, and that gives people a false sense of security. I think that's dangerous."

And artists' friends comfort the afflicted. Manhattan Gallery Owner Holly Solomon knows dozens of AIDS victims. "One night this April," she recalls, "I went to Willi Smith's memorial. Then to Fourcade's funeral on Friday morning. That same week Tucker Ashworth ((p.r. chief for the city planning commission)) became very, very ill. At his home I held him in my arms and tried to console him. He died about a month later." The disease infects her business as well. "One day a woman called me to sell paintings her son had collected. He died when he was 31; she couldn't stand the reminders."

Hollywood can't stand to think much about AIDS either. The disease's two most celebrated victims, Liberace and Rock Hudson, may have worked there, and the movie industry may have nearly as high a concentration of gays as New York City. But the town has not been devastated by AIDS. Says a writer: "In the top echelons of Hollywood, people are always looking over their shoulder. Caution leads to sexual sobriety, and that could save their lives."

San Francisco has lost too many lives -- the highest proportion of any major U.S. city -- in and out of the arts. Moby Dick Records, an independent label with several popular disco disks in the early '80s, folded in 1984 after seven of its ten core employees died of AIDS. IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO HAVE MARCHED ON reads a plaque at the base of the stairs leading to the offices of the San Francisco Band Foundation; it tallies twelve AIDS deaths, including that of Jon Sims, 36, the charismatic founder of the Gay Freedom Day Marching Band & Twirling Corps. Theater Rhinoceros has lost seven actors, directors and playwrights since 1984. Of the six actors in the company's production that year of C.D. Arnold's King of the Crystal Palace, four have died and one now has AIDS. "A nurse in my latest play says, 'I'm sick of all this sickness,' " Arnold notes. "Sometimes I just want to go see 18 Fred Astaire movies in a row and just forget about it."

Others manage to find strength and serenity in their affliction. Gerald lo Presti, a second tenor with the Gay Men's Chorus, was diagnosed as having AIDS in 1985. When crippling lesions spread to his vocal cords, Lo Presti had the lesions burned off and kept singing. When he could no longer sing the tenor range, he relearned all his parts in bass three weeks before the season began. Still later, he insisted on a blood transfusion that would allow him to tour with the chorus. "He practically had to be held up," recalls Perry George, a member of the chorus, "but he sang radiantly." Two months later Lo Presti was dead at 33. Now George has AIDS. "It's been -- how do I say this gracefully? -- the best thing ever to happen to the interpretive powers in my singing. When you're told you have a year and a half to live, such things as sunsets, dahlias and solo singing recitals take on a whole new meaning."

At first awful glance, Edwin Flath looks to have been consumed by AIDS. Flath, founder and musical director of the California Bach Society Choral Group, is 57 but looks 87. His body, swathed in blankets, shakes with each terrible cough. But his parchment eyelids flutter open at the thought of his music. "I'm learning a new repertoire," he says when the coughing subsides. "Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms sonatas. Life and art are inseparable -- you love it and you give it away." He rises from bed and slowly walks to his piano, sits and begins a short piece by Leos Janacek. He opens the nearest window and begins playing with more authority, his eyes closed, his head thrown back, a hand poised dramatically to flourish over the keys. His eyes open again, and now they glow like coals from beneath the white ridges of his skull. At the finish, some color has returned to his face. "There is no ego now," he says. "For the rest of my life I hope to live with grace, make the best use of my talents and share them with others. That's the greatest joy of a musician."

For the 1,000 at last week's Ludlam tribute, there was joy and sadness in the final scene, from Ludlam's unfinished play Houdini. The master escape artist (to have been played by Ludlam) has been dead for a decade, but his wife Bess (Black-Eyed Susan) is forlornly trying to communicate with his spirit. She will try one last time with a medium named Dr. Saint (Quinton). They sit at a small table, hands joined; behind them is a blank screen. Nothing happens, and Bess sobs that she will never see her husband again. As she speaks, a huge image on the screen slowly comes into focus. It is Houdini -- Ludlam! -- in chains, in a cage, staring out at them. She and the medium do not notice this spectral presence, and the lights fade on them, as the theater audience is held mesmerized in the gaze of the genius that was and might have been. But for AIDS.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York and Dennis Wyss/San Francisco