Ask Me Again Tomorrow (12 page)

We finished our summer on the Cape and a core group of about eight of us decided to go to Boston and open a theater company. We found a space, an empty loft, on the third floor of an old building on Charles Street in Beacon Hill. We had to build everything ourselves—the stage, the seats, and the prop and dressing areas. Then we had to build the sets, make the costumes, and even print the tickets—everything! We planned a season and assigned jobs, and mine was acting as the group spokesperson when dealing with our landlords or other vendors. I enjoyed doing this job and, as it turned out, I was good at it.

We called ourselves the Actors Company, and our first year was rocky, exhilarating—and a success. We revived
La Ronde
and it did very well, though this run was much less scandalous than our run on the Cape. We did a production of Sartre’s
No Exit,
Federico García Lorca’s
Blood Wedding
, Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
, Arthur Miller’s
A View from the Bridge
, Tennessee Williams’s
Orpheus Descending,
and Truman Capote’s
The Grass Harp
. We were hailed as “one of Boston’s most exciting up-and-coming theaters.”

That summer, we took on a producer, the lawyer who defended us on the obscenity charges the summer before, and did another summer of stock on Martha’s Vineyard. I was even approached by a New York talent agent who told me to call her if I ever got to the city. I took her number and forgot all about it.

When we got back to Boston that fall, we added a director to our staff and moved into a bigger theater in downtown Boston on Warrington Street. Though we still called ourselves the Actors Company, we named our theater the Charles Street Playhouse so that theatergoers would know that we were the young company from Beacon Hill. The space on Warrington Street was on the second floor, above a lesbian bar. Depending on the backstage configuration, we often had to walk through the bar to get from one side of the stage to the other. I remember walking through the bar during
The Crucible
, by Arthur Miller, and everyone in the bar would fall silent and stare at this eighteenth-century woman in full costume.

But it wasn’t that easy to get the theater open. Every time we thought we had everything up to code, some inspector would cite us for another violation. This was beginning to cause real problems, as we were seriously short on cash and in jeopardy of closing before we had even opened. That’s when “Big Joe,” our landlord, came to our rescue.

Everyone said that Big Joe was “connected,” but I liked him because he was so direct, and I particularly liked his wife, who was an ex-stripper. He understood our dilemma. “Meet me here tomorrow morning at seven
A.M
. and I’ll show you how we open a theater in Boston, little lady.” The next morning, I was standing in front of the theater when Joe pulled up in an enormous black car. The driver kept the car idling at the curb while Joe went into the theater. I watched as each inspector came in, looked at the theater, and talked to Joe. Joe would reach into his pocket, take out a huge wad of cash, and peel off a few bills. Then the men would shake hands. When the last of the inspectors left, Joe turned to me and said, “And that, little lady, is how you open a theater in Boston.”

We had a second well-attended season, but our group began to change and things began to fall apart. The lawyer who produced the summer season left. A Boston businessman and our director decided the two of them would form a producing team. They told us we would all be creating an ensemble, but as the year went on it became clear they wanted control of the company. They wanted to bring in outside actors. We saw the writing on the wall. We were being marginalized and people began to leave, but I stayed until the bitter end. The producers insisted that they owned all of the props and costumes and other materials the company had either made or purchased during our first year. I was outraged by how we had been lied to and deceived. One night, I got a friend to drive me to the theater. When we got there, I asked him to wait with the engine running and I headed directly to the costume closet, grabbing as much stuff as I could carry. With my arms full, I started to run across the balcony of the theater. From down on stage, I heard the producer yell, “You can’t take those—they’re not yours.” Then I heard Big Joe say, “It’s okay. Let the little lady go.” I threw all the costumes into the back of the car. “Step on it!” I yelled—I was scared. I called my cousin Michael, who was then practicing law. I asked him what to do. Without missing a beat, he said, “Time to go to New York.”

I
GOT TO
New York in late 1959, when I was twenty-eight years old. I had exactly fifty-seven dollars in my pocket. My friend and former roommate Roberta had taken an apartment in the East Forties, and she suggested I stay with her until I got work and could find a place of my own. I was grateful for her couch and her generosity.

I loved the energy and diversity of Manhattan and I loved the anonymity of the crowded streets. Everyone was from someplace else. Everyone had a different story to tell. I felt free of my preoccupation with ethnicity, since I was surrounded by it. I wasn’t “other”; in this city,
everyone
was “other.” Now the challenge was making a place for myself as an actress. I spent every evening reading the trades and every day running around town to find auditions. In order to audition, you needed an appointment, but I had no contacts, so I tried to crash auditions! I had no agent, no manager—I didn’t even have a résumé or a headshot. I must have seemed right off the farm. All I had was one good pair of shoes and a lot of drive. My money was dwindling. Roberta never asked me to contribute to the rent, but it bothered me. It was finally getting through to me that making a living as an actress was not going to be easy. The first thing I had to do was pay my bills, which meant getting what actors call a “job-job.” Physical therapy was an option, but that was a
real
job, eight hours a day with no time or energy for anything else. Waitressing was perfect for me. The first job I got was in a deli-restaurant, but I didn’t last long, only long enough to get my own apartment.

I found a roommate, a darling young actress named Linda Lavin, who had worked at the Actors Company on the Cape. That first year I took whatever job I could: I waited tables, proofread, worked at Bloomingdale’s, and I even worked as a secretary for a short time until my boss found out that I had lied when I said I knew stenography and was a good typist. I could do neither! All I cared about was getting acting work. I just knew I had to be an actress.

Maybe I should have been frightened by how little I understood the business, but I was blessedly ignorant and determined to succeed. But success was more than getting a job and paying my rent. I’d been in New York for months and all I’d really done was work a series of non-acting jobs and wear down the heels on my one pair of shoes. One day I was sitting on the steps of the New York Public Library, where I’d stopped on my way home and decided to sit outside. People-watching was great, free entertainment. I was watching all the little dramas of people’s lives playing themselves out when I realized that on either side of me were the two massive stone lions that guard the steps of the library. They were named by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia during the Great Depression and for the mayor symbolized the persevering spirit of all New Yorkers. Their names are Patience and Fortitude. Sitting there, I decided in that moment that I would not only survive here but—to use the phrase William Faulkner used when he accepted the Nobel Prize—I would
prevail
.

If ever there was a time to be in New York, the late fifties and early sixties was it. The theater was exploding with thrilling, risky, avant-garde work like Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros,
which won the Tony in 1960. Or Genet’s
The Balcony
and Edward Albee’s
Zoo Story
and Samuel Beckett’s
Krapp’s Last Tape
. The theater scene was experimental and exciting and I wanted to be part of it.

I wanted to reconnect with acting. I didn’t want to lose my energy for it while I was waiting tables and going on auditions. I went back to class to study with Peter Kass, who was now teaching privately in New York. And I found myself a therapist. I still felt I needed clarity in my life in order to work and love the way I knew I could.

On New Year’s Day, 1960, I had just stumbled home from a wonderful New Year’s Eve party. I had barely gotten myself to bed and the phone rang. It was Alan Ansara from Peter Kass’s class. He was starring in
The Breaking Wall
down at the St. Mark’s Playhouse.

“Olympia. Something’s opened up and I think it’s right for you,” he began. “It’s a small part, an Italian peasant.” I sobered up. “But you have to be here now. They need someone to start immediately.”

I got the part, my first paying job as an actor in New York! I would be paid twenty-five dollars a week and an additional five dollars for maintaining the costumes and props. I even got a nice mention in the
Village Voice
review.

Within a very short time of
The Breaking Wall
closing, I was cast as the landlady in
The New Tenant
, by Eugene Ionesco. The actor playing opposite me was a scene-stealer, a true glutton on the stage. One day I told Peter it was so bad, I was going to quit. He said, “No. Don’t leave until you learn how to be better at it than he is.” He wanted me to
learn
something from the experience, so I did.

Then, thanks to my old friend Ed Heffernan from the Actors Company in Boston, I got a job in the subscription office of the Phoenix Theatre, where Ed was now a member of the company. He also got me an audition for their educational touring company. We traveled around regional schools performing classics such as
Romeo and Juliet
,
Antony and Cleopatra
, Chekhov’s
The Boor,
and others. The students were a great audience. They especially loved the “girls against the boys” battle in
The Taming of the Shrew
. I loved hearing the girls cheer for Kate and the boys for Petruchio. The most important thing of all, though, was that this was an Equity job. I got my union card and became a
working
actor. Now I could afford my own place with no roommate. I moved to a fifth-floor walk-up in Alphabet City on New York’s Lower East Side that I furnished with castoffs from the street. My bathtub was in the kitchen and I shared a hallway john with two drunken Ukrainians. My apartment was the site of an ongoing gin game with other actors from the building and the neighborhood. My rent was $27.50 a month. The only area of my life that was unsatisfactory was my love life. But that’s not to say that I didn’t have one.

The summer of 1960 I went to Saranac Lake to do summer stock and tumbled into a passionate affair with a handsome actor named H who was in the company. I was doing
The Rose Tattoo
and my old friend Jane Cronin, who was also in the company, noticed that night after night, H was in the audience or in the bar where we went after a performance. H wasn’t in this show and wasn’t supposed to be there until rehearsals for the next show began. “There he is again,” Jane would say to me. “Why don’t you go say hello.”

I knew he was married and had two children. I had seen other women friends get involved with married men and it was always a heartache. But my own curiosity got the better of me.

It was wonderful to be together. We had great fun and I was
happy
—happier than I’d been since N. I let myself exist only in the moment, with no thought of the reality that awaited us back in New York.

Back in the city, H went home to his family on Long Island. We continued to see each other, but the role of the “other woman” was making me physically and emotionally distraught. One day H showed up, almost wild with grief; he’d returned home after our last meeting to find his wife and their children in the car with the motor running and the garage door closed. I was horrified. There was no way to continue, so without any hesitation I told him he had to go back to his wife. We both knew we had to stop seeing each other. I spent the next couple of weeks feeling as though I was in limbo. I was withdrawn and distracted. Slowly, I came out of my cocoon. I forced myself to start “dating,” but I couldn’t bear the idea of another passionate affair that could end badly. For the first time, I was seeing more than one man at a time, playing the field.

I dated nearly two dozen men over the next six months, all of them for about a week, none of them for more than a month. The man, the duration of the involvement, what we engaged in; it was all on
my
terms. The only drawback to socializing so aggressively was that I was also drinking, part of the whole mating game then, as it is now. I found that even while I was claiming my body, my sexuality, and my independence, I was also becoming a little too fond of boilermakers, a lethal cocktail made by dropping a shot glass full of Scotch into a pint of beer. To complicate things, lately I had been enjoying a bit of marijuana with my drink.

Our watering hole was Blue and Gold on Seventh Street, between Second and First avenues (it’s still there!). It was a Ukrainian bar with a little dance floor and an accordion player. There was also a great jukebox. The owner’s wife served pierogis and potato pancakes at the bar, and the occasional hard-boiled egg as a nod to the Irish. On my thirtieth birthday, in June of 1961, we’d had a great party, dancing with a group of Ukrainian sailors who’d come into port. I went home alone.

When I woke up the next day my body felt beaten up. I gave myself a birthday present: “No more hard liquor,” I said. “From now on, wine only.”

About six months into my thirtieth year I took a job as a reader for
The Opening of a Window,
which was being produced by Jerry Giardino, an actor with whom I’d played in
The Breaking Wall
. Even though this wasn’t a formal audition, I knew Jerry would hear me read the part of the female lead with the actors auditioning for the male lead. After about a week, he saw how right I was for the part and hired me. One day, the most stunning man I’d ever seen came to audition. He was tall, about six feet three, with black curly hair and a trim black beard. His energy and spirit took over the room. The casting director introduced him: Louis Zorich. When Louie told me he was playing Hercules in a production across town, I thought, “Now there’s a piece of inspired casting.” When we read together I realized he was not only good-looking, he was also a fine actor. The only problem was that the character he read for was frail and sick and would die of consumption. There was no way this well-built and healthy Adonis could be convincing. But I had a very good time in the play and I got my first substantial review. In the
New York Herald Tribune,
Judith Crist wrote: “Olympia Dukakis manages to make the cliché come to life…in the flash of a smile, a naive gesture, a sudden slump of her shoulders. She has tenderness and warmth and fleeting revelations of inner fire; she rises above the role.” I permitted myself to feel I was on my way. And though Louis Zorich didn’t get the part, he would get the girl.

I started to immerse myself in the theater scene. I went to see other actresses I admired—Julie Harris, Maureen Stapleton, Kim Stanley, and Colleen Dewhurst. Geraldine Page, who I had seen in
Sweet Bird of Youth,
was my hero because she was so much her own woman. All of these actresses inspired me.

Over the next year, I’d see Louis Zorich around town, usually dressed to the nines and always with a different woman on his arm. When we finally connected, everything in my life changed. Everything truly began to open and flower. It was wonderful—and scary.

I was in a workshop production of
Medea,
directed by Tom Brennan, who I’d met in the summer of ’61 when I did a season at the Williamstown Summer Theatre (now known as the Williamstown Theatre Festival). The actor playing Medea’s husband, Jason, quit to move to Los Angeles. I suggested that Tom cast Louie Zorich and Tom took my word for it. Now I got to see Louie every day. I was involved with another man at the time, but I was so attracted to Louie that I’d purposely make love with my boyfriend just before I’d leave for rehearsal so that I wouldn’t be completely distracted by Louie. I remember him even kidding me one day because I showed up wearing my sweater inside out. There was no overt flirtation between us on the set, but one night, Tom offered us two tickets to a musical version of
Twelfth Night
starring Dom DeLuise. I wasn’t sure if he was offering us two pairs of tickets or if he was suggesting that we go together, so I simply held my breath and waited for Louie’s response. “Would you like to go?” he asked. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do. After the play, we went for drinks, and it became clear there was an attraction between us. We ended up back at his place. Louie lived in a brownstone on Horatio Street in the West Village that looked like it was plucked from the pages of a Henry James novel. It was a beautiful brownstone on one of those shaded, quiet streets you occasionally come across in the Village when you stop and wonder if you haven’t somehow traveled back in time to some European city. Louie’s building, in addition to being beautiful, had a charming courtyard planted with trees and rows of colorful flowers. Every other actor I knew lived in a tenement.

Inside was another story. His apartment had all the warmth and ambiance of a monk’s cell. The only furnishings were a cot, big enough for one, a dresser, a table, two wooden chairs, and a recliner. His kitchen contained an assortment of protein powders and vitamins in the cupboards and fruit, nuts, and grains in the refrigerator. Everything about the apartment said “No visitors allowed!”

The next morning, Louis got up, made some coffee for himself, and went out to buy the paper. I had been involved in enough one-night stands to know the drill: I’m sure he expected me to leave. Instead, like something out of a bad French movie, I stayed, lounging around in my black slip, smoking cigarettes. When he got back, he barely acknowledged me. He sat on one of the wooden chairs, drinking his coffee and reading the paper. Continuing to ignore me, he did his voice exercises and made himself a protein drink, and all the while he never said a word. This went on until the phone rang. “Sure, come on over,” I heard him say. The next thing I knew, a lovely young woman came to the door. “Come on in,” Louis told her. I was still there, still in my black slip. My behavior, I knew, was risky (and completely unplanned), but he never suggested I leave. He could have found a way to get rid of me, but he didn’t. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but I knew I had more to lose here than just the “next man” in my life, so I took it as a sign. Louis and his friend chatted uncomfortably for awhile, and finally—probably realizing that I was going to outlast her—she left. When the door closed behind her, Louis looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you?” I couldn’t talk, but I knew. I just nodded.