Peter Masterson, ‘Little Whorehouse’ director, dies at 84
Peter Masterson, who co-wrote and co-directed the bawdy hit Broadway musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and directer, a died Tuesday at his home in Kinderhook. He was 84.
Actress Mary Stuart Masterson, his daughter, confirmed the death. He had received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease 14 years ago.
Masterson had played various movie, television and stage roles when he read an article by Larry L. King in a 1974 issue of Playboy about the shuttering of the Chicken Ranch bordello in Texas. When Masterson called King to suggest that the article had the makings of a musical, King laughed.
“It seemed as incongruous as if someone had asked me to assist in open-heart surgery,” King wrote in The New York Times in 1978.
King’s doubts did not last long. He began collaborating with Masterson on the book of “The Best Little Whorehouse” while Carol Hall, a friend of both men (who died in October), wrote the songs. In late 1976, they presented several scenes in a workshop at the Actors Studio, of which Masterson was a longtime member.
“Actors Studio is a tough place to play,” Masterson said in a 1980 interview. “They look at a work like doctors, very clinically. No one laughs or cries. That wasn’t true with Whorehouse. They reacted, laughed a lot and we knew we had something good right away.”
The Actors Studio subsequently financed a showcase production of the musical before its brief offbroadway run and its opening in June 1978 at the 46th Street Theater on Broadway. One of its stars was Carlin Glynn, Masterson’s wife, who played Mona Stangley, the brothel owner.
“She’s a good actress, but she’d never been a singer,” Mary Masterson said in a telephone interview. “She was already part of the Actors Studio, and she studied with a singing coach, and she turned out to be amazing.” Glynn won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical.
The musical, co-directed by Tommy Tune, ran for 1,584 performances and inspired a film version, in 1982, starring Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton.
Peter Masterson lost out on directing the “Whorehouse” film because of creative differences with the studio, Mary Masterson said. It was directed by Colin Higgins.
But Peter Masterson’s success with “Whorehouse” led him to spend time as a directing adviser to the Sundance Institute, which nurtures independent filmmaking. Masterson told Robert Redford, the institute’s founder, that he wanted to adapt “The Trip to Bountiful,” originally a TV play, into a movie. Redford’s father-inlaw then, Sterling Van Wagenen, founding executive director of the institute, produced the film.
Masterson had been familiar since high school with Foote’s work — dramas about the resilience of ordinary people as they shoulder the burdens of everyday life — from watching television productions of them.
“Bountiful,” set in 1947, is aboutcarrie, an old woman who lives in a cramped Houston apartment with her son and daughter and wants to return to her rural hometown. It was adapted for Broadway in 1953, just months after it was first seen on TV. Released in 1985, it starred Geraldine Page as Carrie, John Heard as her son and Glynn as her daughter.
“This kind of material is like Chekhov,” Masterson said in an 1986 Associated Press story.
In his review of the film in The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that “Bountiful” “works perfectly as a small, richly detailed film,” and that it “doesn’t have the constructed manner of a play that’s been filmed.”
Carlos Bee Masterson Jr. was born on June 1, 1934, in Houston and raised in Angleton, Texas, about 40 miles south. His father was a lawyer and a mayor of Angleton, and his mother, Josephine (Smith), was a homemaker.
Masterson graduated from Rice University with a bachelor’s in history but left soon after graduation to study with Stella Adler’s method acting. He had been drawn to acting by childhood trips to Broadway shows with his grandmother and by his father’s love of Shakespeare.
His early work was largely small roles on TV and film. But he did play one lead role on Broadway, in “The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald,” by Amram Ducovny and Leon Friedman. It closed after nine performances in 1967. In The Times, Clive Barnes wrote that Masterson, playing Pres. John F. Kennedy’s assassin, looked “appropriately bewildered and mixed-up.”
On film, Masterson played his daughter Mary’s father in “The Stepford Wives” (1975) and in “Gardens of Stone” (1987), a military drama, for which the director, Francis Ford Coppola, also cast Glynn as her mother.
Masterson then directed his daughter in “Lily Dale” (1996), a TV movie based on a play and screenplay by Foote, and “Whiskey School” (2005), which also featured Olympia Dukakis and Glynn.
“He was a hands-off director,” Mary Masterson said. “I started worrying that he’d given up on me and said to him, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m treating you like a movie star.’ He stopped that.”
“When an actor ran out of his own impulse,” she said, “he’d give you that one word or idea that helped you define it.”
In addition to his wife and his daughter Mary, Masterson is survived by another daughter, Alexandra Masterson; a son, Peter; and six grandchildren.
Masterson wrote a 1979 Playbill story describing interactions with theatergoers about the musical.
“Excuse me,” he said to a man after the first act ended. “I wrote and directed this play. Would you like to ask me anything?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Where’s the men’s room?”