Stephanie Grisham’s tell-all tome about her time in the Trump White House contains lots of anecdotes that would be dismissed out of hand if they were about anyone other than Trump. They usually contain more than a kernel of truth, of course — for example, nobody doubts that Trump would go into towering rage tantrums. What’s harder to believe is that the staff would calm him down by playing his favorite show tunes — or that a particularly effective one was this showstopper from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s loved-and-loathed hit musical “Cats.”
Though “Cats” was taken mostly from T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” whimsical (for Eliot) poems he sent to his godchildren, “Memory” was built around eight lines from “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” a poem published in 1915, years before the cat poems were written. Performed by a once-glamorous, now-tattered cat named Grizabella, the song is the show’s emotional climax, and the only one from “Cats” to become a standard — it’s been recorded over 600 times. This clip features Elaine Paige, who originated the role on the West End when Judi Dench tore her Achilles’ tendon late in rehearsals.
So why does it appeal to Trump? Well, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” wasn’t about cats — those lines were about a London streetwalker Eliot glimpsed by lamplight:
Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin
Then, too, there’s the self-pity — Grizabella is shunned by the other cats, literally untouchable, and is “all alone with my memories of my days in the sun.” But she will be elevated to a new life at the play’s end.
Betty Buckley, who played Grizabella in the original Broadway production, reacted empathetically to the news of the song’s effect on Trump.
“I was like, oh, man. you know, the guy is so wounded, his soul is so damaged and I feel that on some level this beautiful lyric by Trevor Nunn and the music by Andrew Lloyd Webber resonates with what remains of the window into whatever soul he might actually have. You know, he has this insatiable need to be loved because daddy just didn’t, you know, and neither did mommy so it would seem. And so he’s really mad at the world about that.”
Maybe she’s right, but Trump doesn’t strike me as someone who listens very closely to the lyrics.