Patti LuPone stood in a midtown recording studio one spring afternoon, talking to Carrie Bradshaw. LuPone, who descends from what she calls Sicilian peasant stock, had filmed an arc on the upcoming season of "And Just Like That . . . ," as the Italian mama of Giuseppe (Sebastiano Pigazzi), the young boyfriend of Carrie's gay pal Anthony (Mario Cantone). She was now recording some dialogue tweaks in postproduction. On a monitor, her character, Gianna, was greeting Carrie at a party. At the microphone, LuPone tried out different line readings: "Ciao." (Imperious.) "Ciao!" (Warm.) "Ciao-ciao!" (Sprightly.)
"Just fill it up a little bit," the showrunner, Michael Patrick King, instructed.
"I like your dress verrry much. Verrry pretty," LuPone purred in an Italian accent.
"Shit, now I have to call the Writers Guild," King joked, about her ad-lib. They moved on to a scene in which Gianna spars with Anthony in his apartment. King had written LuPone a saucy exit line: "Questo corridoio puzza," which translates to "This hallway stinks." LuPone gave him options, punching her "P"s: "Questo corridoio puzza!" (Pugnacious.) "Questo corridoio puzza." (Droll.) "Questo corridoio puzza! Ugh!" (Revolted.) When they wrapped, King told her, "You are a delight."
"Thank you for including me, honest to God," LuPone said. "And just, you know, think of me. Because I don't want to be onstage anymore. Period."
This was almost like a queen proclaiming her abdication. LuPone is Broadway's reigning grande dame, with a big voice and an even bigger mouth. She's one of the city's last living broads: brassy, belty, and profane, with the ferocity of a bullet train coming right at you. She's as famous for playing musical theatre's iron ladies -- Eva Perón in "Evita," Rose in "Gypsy" -- as she is for her offstage rumbles. She's fought with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who in the nineties replaced her with Glenn Close in his musical "Sunset Boulevard." (LuPone trashed her dressing room, sued his company, and used part of the settlement to build herself a pool, which she christened the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool.) She's fought with co-stars. (In her memoir, she called Bill Smitrovich, who played her husband on the TV drama "Life Goes On," a "thoroughly distasteful man." Smitrovich: "She's a very, very guileful woman.") She has even fought with audience members. She once palmed a cellphone from a texter's hand, mid-play. In 2022, during a talkback for the musical "Company," she berated a spectator, "Put your mask over your nose. . . . That is the rule. If you don't want to follow the rule, get the fuck out!" Ask her about Madonna ("a movie killer") or "Real Housewives" ("I really don't want to know about those trashy lives"), and you'll get a zinger worthy of Bette Davis -- one of her heroines, along with Édith Piaf. ("I prefer the flawed to the perfect," she told me.) Her bluntness has made her a kind of urban folk hero. On the Tony Awards red carpet in 2017, she declared that she would never perform for President Trump. Asked why, she responded, "Because I hate the motherfucker, how's that?" The clip went viral.
At seventy-six, LuPone has acquired an unlikely cool factor. Since winning her second Tony -- for "Gypsy," in 2008 -- she's played herself on "Glee" and "Girls," a bathhouse singer on "American Horror Story," and an occultist on "Penny Dreadful," and she's voiced a yellow giant on the cult sitcom "Steven Universe" and a socialite mouse on "BoJack Horseman." The indie director Ari Aster cast her as a harridan mother in "Beau Is Afraid," and last year she joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as a witch in "Agatha All Along." "She doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks," her coven-mate Aubrey Plaza told me. Last fall, Plaza ended up living in her apartment, at LuPone's urging, while making her Off Broadway début. "She basically kept me alive," Plaza said. "I would wake up, and she would be making me soup. One morning, she was carving a turkey, and she would go, 'Doll, I have to go out of town for some gigs, but I'm gonna carve this up and put it in the fridge, and you're gonna make sandwiches with it throughout the week.' "
Bridget Everett, the raunchy alt-cabaret performer who starred in HBO's "Somebody Somewhere," met LuPone through the director and lyricist Scott Wittman. LuPone brought Everett onstage at Carnegie Hall for a duet, and they're now developing a double act called "Knockouts." "You think of her as the greatest living Broadway legend," Everett told me. "You don't think of her as a person. So when, all of a sudden, you're out in the country and she hops in the pool buck naked, you're, like, 'O.K., there's Patti LuPone! Let's roll.' "
After her dubbing session, LuPone collected her crocodile purse and got into an S.U.V. on Eighth Avenue. As it lurched past the theatre district, she explained why she is, at least for now, done with Broadway. "I'm so angry at whoever choked the stem right in the middle by making Times Square a pedestrian mall," she said. When she was starring in "Company,"LuPone would carry a bullhorn and yell at pedestrians from her car window. "It's impossible for us to get to work," she told me. "And I said that years ago. So I start work angry. I can't get to my theatre, because of the traffic pattern, because of the arrogance of the people in the streets. It's a road. Get out of the street."
She preferred the gritty old New York of the sixties and seventies, when she moved from Long Island to make her name. Sure, the city was broke. Sure, there were muggers. (Once, when a stranger groped her friend near Grant's Tomb, LuPone turned "she-lion" -- her word -- and shrieked at the guy until he fled into Riverside Park.) Sure, she heard a "scream of death" one night outside her window, in Chelsea, and knew that somebody was getting murdered. But the city was "bankrupt, dangerous, and creative," she insisted. Now it's all gone corporate, including the theatre, which she worries has reverted to "the gaiety phase of Broadway, when it was just follies and Ziegfeld girls."
She's even angrier at the rest of the country. She told me, more than once, that the Trumpified Kennedy Center "should get blown up." In the S.U.V., apropos the current Administration, she pronounced, "Leave. New York. Alone. Make it its own country. I mean, is there any other city in America that's as diverse, as in-your-face? It's a live-or-die city, it really is. Stick it out or leave." The car dropped her off at a restaurant on the Upper West Side. She asked for sherry -- she'd discovered it while doing "Les Misérables" in England in the eighties -- but the bartender said that they didn't carry it, so she settled for a glass of rosé, with a side of ice cubes.
In person, LuPone is fun-seeking and dishy. She recalled one of her first trips into Manhattan, to see Saint-Saëns's "Samson and Delilah" at the Met. "They were two of the fattest people I've ever seen onstage," she told me. "There was a bed, two very large singers, a male and a female, and a bowl of fruit on the bed. And all I could concentrate on was that bowl of fruit and when they were gonna knock it to the floor." She let out a big, booming "HA!"