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Patti LuPone visits Northport en route to 'Gypsy'

BY ROBERT KAHN | robert.kahn@newsday.com

March 23, 2008

Patti LuPone steps out onto Main Street in a knee-length coat made of leather and mink. The reversible fur is accessorized with a matching maroon stole and red suede boots. It's the sort of outfit that would be perfect for a 40th high school reunion, if that milestone hadn't been notched a year or so earlier.

A young woman passing by Skipper's Pub recognizes LuPone, who graduated from Northport High School in 1967 and has returned on something of a nostalgia trip, to break up a weekend of rehearsals for "Gypsy," which she'll open Thursday on Broadway.

"Oh. My. Gawd. You're Patti LuPone. I loved 'Life Goes On'! I'm a huge Broadway fan," says the woman, a college student home on break, making reference to the TV series in which LuPone starred in the early '90s.

"So get out your camera. Let's take a picture," LuPone tells her.

It's not often that LuPone, 59, comes back to the community where she spent the first two decades of her life, so tonight she wants to drink it in. Her driver has removed the passenger side headrest from the black Escalade they took east from Manhattan, the better to have an unobstructed view of the landmarks on the way. Among them: the four towering smokestacks of the LIPA plant - LuPone says the building, with its blinking red lights, looks like Mothra, the Japanese movie monster.

The evening's agenda includes a stop at the Sweet Shop on Main Street, to satisfy an egg cream craving, and then dinner at Skipper's, where LuPone quickly zeros in on a portrait of an old sea salt hanging by the storefront window. LuPone cracks that when she was a kid, "every guy at the bar looked like that."

With her parents both passed on and childhood pals spread across the country, LuPone's ties to Northport are few. "Funerals, mostly," she says with a shrug when asked what circumstances bring her back nowadays. For the past two decades, her life has orbited around northwestern Connecticut, where she lives with husband, Matt Johnston, whom she married in 1988 on stage at the Vivian Beaumont, and their son, Joshua, 17, a high school junior.

A while later, over a dinner of chicken and vegetables (the latter a substitute for pasta), LuPone talks about the green, clapboard-style ranch on Locust Street where she was raised with her older twin brothers, Robert, an actor and founder of the Manhattan Class Company, and William, a Vermont librarian.

The Locust Street house has long since been demolished, replaced by a McMansion. "I never liked our house, but I liked the land," LuPone says. "It doesn't surprise me that the house came down. What surprises me is what they did with the new house, how they sited it on that land."

The notion of "home" factors into LuPone's conversations with regularity. On her nightstand in Litchfield County, LuPone says, there is a copy of "The Mansions of Long Island's Gold Coast," by Monica Randall.

Twenty years in Northport. Twenty in Manhattan. Twenty in Connecticut.

"Every 20 years, I seem to get wanderlust," she says

As a girl, LuPone attended Ocean Avenue Elementary, at the same time her father, Orlando, was the school principal. Her first taste of "fame" came at 4, when she was enrolled in an extracurricular dance club, learning pirouettes and arabesques. Audiences were composed mostly of parents of the children on stage; nonetheless, LuPone thought everyone was looking only at her.

"And I just thought, 'Ooh, this is the place to be,'" she says.

In swift fashion, tap, jazz and ballet classes followed with the Andres Dance Company in Huntington. The Andres turned the LuPone kids into the LuPone Trio, booking them to perform at Kiwanis and Rotary clubs across Long Island. These experiences would form the basis for what came later: dance classes with Martha Graham and drama lessons with John Houseman, after Juilliard.

Orlando LuPone always wanted his kids to become teachers. After his divorce from Patti's mother in 1961, the kids' path to a show-business career was opened. Angela "Pat" LuPone raised the trio, shuttling them back and forth to their various entertainment-themed commitments. (Despite Angela's nickname, Patti is named for her great-great aunt, 19th century Italian opera star Adelina Patti.)

In interviews throughout her career, LuPone has sung the praises of the music programs offered by the Northport school district, as well as teachers such as Robert Krueger and Esther Scott.

The 1967 Tiger Tales yearbook lists the large-larynxed senior as "Most Musical," "Most Dramatic" and "Class Clown." Scott, speaking by phone from upstate Potsdam, would concur. The retiree remembers that a group of students had gathered in the school commons, which could be viewed by administrators from a railing above. Patti was campaigning for some office, and was giving a speech: "If I'm elected..."

Some classmates hoisted her into a garbage can and lifted both Patti and can, en masse, atop a set of lockers.

Patti just kept talking.