A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (11 page)

“They’re making book. We’re the front for it.” It’s Leon. He’s come off the stand, and the tenor is singing now. “That jerk should be selling neckties at Woolworths.” Leon lopes back up to the mike and talks the tenor into letting him into his act. He tells the tenor to put his arms behind his back. Leon will be his arms. The tenor does what Leon tells him and the result is hilarious, particularly since the tenor can’t see what Leon’s up to and is dumb enough to think he’s the reason for the applause. Leon comes off the stand and winks at me. Hess storms out of the bar.

“That’s very low class!” He’s furious I’m laughing. “Get up there and sing ‘La Vie en Rose’. Dana don’t do French.” Hess is impressed I can sing in French. “I got a newspaper columnist in the bar. He’s ready to write a story on us. So, after you sing “La Vie en Rose,” sing “The Lady is a Tramp” and when you get to the line ‘I follow Winchell,’ put in the columnist’s name.” I do.

After I come off the stand, the columnist introduces himself and his wife. “Thanks for the plug.”

I babble at him that I read his column every day, which is a great thumping lie. He smirks anyway.

“You’re a nice kid, but your act stinks. Lay off the jump tunes. Stick to the ballads.”

The next night, the columnist turns up alone. And drunk.

“Sing ‘La Vie en Rose’,” he calls out. I do, and a customer talks through it, which I’m used to, but the columnist isn’t. Not tonight anyway. Tonight, he is my defender. He rises unsteadily and wags his finger. “Nobody talks when she sings, you sonovabitch.”

The talking customer rises, also unsteady and twice the size of the columnist.

“Nobody calls me a sonovabitch, you sonovabitch.”

I feel somehow responsible, and sing all the verses to “La Vie en Rose.” The two men lumber toward each other, leaving a wake of kicked-over chairs. Nervous patrons pay and run; others grin and watch. A waiter goes for Hess. My caution goes into alert. It’s a grade B movie all right, but who’s scripting it? I mince off the bandstand and, as soon as I’m out of sight, pull my black satin dress up over my knees, sprint up the stairs to my dressing room, yank it off, pull on my suburban sweater and skirt, run out, find my car, and speed home to the safety of my suburban identity.

The next night, Hess joins me while I’m waiting to go on.

“You get home all right?”

“Sure.”

Hess has the columnist on his mind. “We get him outta the room. Soon as he comes into the bar, he starts in abusing me. I get the bartender and we shove him out the door. Next thing I know, he’s laying in the gutter.” For the first time Hess seems off his game. “I don’t want to leave him laying there. I don’t want to call the cops. So I call the other clubs. They all say ‘not to worry.’ He’s done it lots.”

Meaning the booze.

“I don’t want to call the cops, see, ‘cause he got a name in this town. He could ruin me.”

Meaning the bookie business.

But nothing comes of it, and nothing turns up in the newspaper column good or bad, which is just as well. The gig’s over, and I don’t need to see my renegade gene in print.

“Thanks for the job, Hess.”

Hess nods, turns his attention to Leon who’s pretending to take out his glass eye, blow on it, polish it on his lapel, and put it back in. There’s a bored clinking of ice cubes. Hess frowns.

“You know something?” he says to me. “One of these days I’m gonna open a real lounge, a ‘class’ room. Somewhere’s out in Brookline, and I’m going to be calling you. You know why? ‘Cause you can talk.” Meaning my patter between songs. Hess is the first person to believe in my words, to think perhaps there might even be money in them. But he doesn’t call, so I never learn if he gets his “room.”

We shake hands to say goodbye. I don’t tell Hess about the chair in my dressing room that Dick has smashed in a rage.

As well as performing in the Vincent Show, I take on running it, a substantial production task since the cast numbers around fifty. However, because I have a great crew, I can cover a good portion of the work from home. The director—who the next year will be hired by the Metropolitan impresario, Rudolf Bing, to be his right hand man—teaches me stagecraft. Everything I’m learning, he says, will apply for any stage production.

Because I’m in charge, Temple and her sister are given the honor of coming up on stage and drawing lucky numbers for prizes donated by the Boston stores. Dressed in their best, complete to scratchy petticoats, the two little girls find being up on a big stage more exciting than being down in the audience. I peep at them from the wings, knowing that home plays will increase in length, style, and insistence that I be there to applaud.

Meanwhile, between performances, a reporter from the
Boston Globe
turns up to interview me. Nervous from the newspaper press over my bookie joint gig, I tell him he can only talk to me for ten minutes, but we hit it off, and the ten minutes stretch into an hour. That night, after seeing the show, he admits he’s Lyon Phelps, the nephew of Yale’s William Lyon Phelps, and the playwright president of the Poets Theatre in Cambridge. Would I be willing to take part in a Poets Theatre reading?

You bet.

The play,
A Leak in the Universe
, turns out to be by the eminent Harvard professor and poet, I.A. Richards, and I am to read opposite Dr. Richards himself. The reading is held in Alice James’ Cambridge drawing room before a small and unbelievably distinguished audience: Harvard President Nathan Pusey, actor Walter Abel, and a covey of Harvard’s top professors—all friends of Dr. Richards. Fortunately, because of the spotlights imported for the reading, I’m blind to their distinction until the reading is finished. Afterwards, the director asks me if I’d consider performing in a full Poets Theatre production.

Awed, I say yes. This is my real dream.

The Poets Theatre, literally a theatre for poets, is producing the dramatic work of America’s best: Mary Manning, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, Frank O’Hara, and V.R. Lang. Under the theatre’s auspices, Dylan Thomas has already given his first American reading, and Truman Capote will shortly take Cambridge by storm reading from an unpublished manuscript.

“I’m going to read you a story I just wrote,” he’ll tell the audience. “It’s about a girl named Holly Golightly.”

Realizing the importance of this theatre, knowing that I can’t swing a full-time job, I parcel out my free time carefully and help out with production.

My first production assignment is for Ionesco’s play,
The Bald Soprano
, newly translated into English by Donald Allen. It’s a brilliant, stylish piece performed in black and white, the actors’ faces whitened, then a black line drawn down the center of each. The reviewers scorn it. “The Poets Theatre has lost its mind,” the newspapers trumpet, not knowing how soon the play will become a classic, taught in every English department.

While working on production, I accept the amused snubs of the poetry crowd who think that, because I don’t react to their snubs, I don’t understand them. It doesn’t matter. Their poetry nourishes me anyway, and I’m too impressed by their Olympian talents to dare to aspire to the password into their world. Besides, some of them aren’t too sure of the password either, so they certainly can’t afford to talk to me. If we do talk, my vocabulary, which Dick scorns as over-elaborate, becomes a blur of smiling stammers. Though I’m pregnant again, I continue to work on production, not wanting to lose the connection.

One of the poets arranges to have Dame Edith and Sir Osbert Sitwell give a poetry reading in Sanders Theatre, which seats over a thousand people. A literary honor for the Poets Theatre and potential financial boon, the little theatre on Palmer Street is in need of a new toilet. Mary Manning, the theatre’s guiding light, remarks, “Perhaps this will pay for both a sit well and a stand well.”

The theatre can’t afford any advertising, and for some reason I can’t fully fathom, I’m handed the task of arranging press releases. Not wanting to admit my ignorance, desperate for some kind of know-how, I go to Alison Arnold, Society Editor for the Boston Herald. As soon as Mrs. Arnold learns the nature of my assignment, she sits me down in her office and teaches me how to write a press release. (Lord, people are kind!)

“Give each paper a little different story. Don’t release all your information to one paper because, once they print it, it becomes dead news and the other papers won’t touch it.”

I do as she bids, and the press, thrilled at the possibility of compiling their own Sitwell story, ask for a press conference.

A press conference? I hadn’t figured on that, nor had the Poets Theatre, which had but ten dollars in the till. I take the ten dollars and a deep breath. Great with my fourth child, I head for The Ritz Carlton Hotel where I’m told the Sitwells will be staying. I explain my problem to the major domo of The Ritz Carlton dining room who looks at my ten dollars and bursts out laughing.

“That won’t buy you two drinks in the bar.”

I must have looked crestfallen.

“Tell you what you can do. The Sitwells have a private suite, so your press conference can come under the heading of a private party instead of a function you’d have to pay the hotel for. Take your ten dollars, buy some whiskey and crackers and cheese (ten dollars went further in those days). Pack it all into a suitcase, walk through the lobby as inconspicuously as possible, take the elevator to the Sitwell’s floor, and give the suitcase to Joe. Meanwhile, I’ll tell Joe you’re coming, and he’ll set up a serving table. If you can find your way to giving Joe a couple of dollars, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

Again, I do as I’m told and again it works. Before the press arrives—and they do arrive, every one of them—the Sitwells welcome me like a favorite niece. Sir Osbert, ever gallant, helps me off with my coat but is suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s so he can’t get the coat onto a hanger. After a humiliating struggle, he thrusts both the coat and the hanger out to me.

“Here, you do it. This damn disease drives me crazy.”

Dame Edith, arrayed in a long robe and richly embroidered headpiece, arranges herself on a sofa looking for all the world like a Beardsley sorceress. I can’t take my eyes off her long, thin fingers adorned with mammoth aquamarines.

I don’t remember how it comes about, but before the press arrives, we strike up a conversation about ghosts, and I learn that Sir Osbert was friends with M. R. James, the Edwardian writer of ghost stories.

“Is
Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook
true?” I ask.

“Well, I think Mickey thought it was true after he’d told it,” says Sir Osbert.

At noon the press arrives and Joe, in a white jacket, manages to make my $10 outlay of booze and crackers look like a catered spread. The press, too impressed to drink, stare at the Sitwells and ask questions that have nothing to do with poetry—like what size shoe does Dame Edith wear. Dame Edith, whose feet are as long as her fingers, stares at their feet and replies coolly, “American women have feet like buns.”

When it’s all over, Joe packs my suitcase with the unopened whiskey, which I promptly return to the local liquor store. The whole affair, including Joe’s tip, comes to $11.65, the extra $1.65 due to a teetotaling reporter from the
Christian Science Monitor
who ordered ginger ale from room service.

Because of all the press—including an article by Alison Arnold—all one thousand, one hundred and sixty-five seats in Sanders Theatre sell out.

The night of the reading, the stage is decorated with blossoming trees left over from the Spring Flower Show. The Sitwells sit under them in a pair of needlepoint armchairs. Two richly embellished icons. Pre-Raphaelite, yes, but reincarnated by Gilbert and Sullivan:

“Walk down Picadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand.”

Anne Sexton’s poetry reading—no such grand affair as the Sitwells’—is a private Sunday afternoon gathering in the forty-seat Palmer Street theatre. It’s Sexton’s first reading since her nervous breakdown. Pretty and touchingly ill at ease, she reads poems she’s written during her breakdown, summoning with lyric genius the suffocating trap of suburbia, which fits too tight and is squeezing the life out of her. Her husband sits nearby, guarding her tenderly, but in the end it will not be enough.