atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (10 page)

Marilyn 

After she’d finished filming the New York scenes for The Seven Year Itch, after her skirt had stopped blowing up around her shoulders as she stood on the grate in front of Bloomingdale’s, after “It’s a wrap!” was called, Marilyn Monroe would drop in now and then on Lee Strasberg’s acting class. Lee was the current guru to the stars, and Marilyn was his biggest catch. It was 1954, and Edward R. Murrow was telling me: “You Are There.” I was there.

With a kerchief around her head and no makeup, her skin was even more luminous. It seemed that if I were to touch it, it might evaporate. When she was there, she was the only one in the class who watched the scenes. The lights would go down and a scene would start, and she would watch it while we watched her glowing in the dark with no makeup. How did she do that?

One day, when it came time to leave, I walked out with her. She’d put her kerchief back on, and we were strolling down Broadway when a woman coming toward us stopped abruptly and gasped. Her mouth made an O, and she gasped again. “Aren’t you Marilyn Monroe?” she said.

“Oh, gosh,” said Marilyn. “You know, people ask me that all the time, and I’m not. I wish I were. I look a little bit like her in certain lights, though.” She gave a friendly giggle, and the woman said, “I coulda sworn you were Marilyn.” And Marilyn replied, “I’m sorry,” and the woman stepped backward as one would for royalty and let her pass.

A lesson in grace, I thought.

In My Merry Widow 

So there I was in the out-of-town tryout, at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, in a French farce, in a merry widow corset, on my second entrance, in my first Broadway show.

The play, Moonbirds by Marcel Aymé, a Frenchman, starred an English actor/knight, Sir Michael Hordern, and a Midwestern sitcom personality, Wally Cox, star of the Mr. Peepers TV series. The play had done well in London but it was too parochial for the States and there were whispers of “It hadn’t made the crossing.” (the Atlantic was much bigger then).

It was November, and it was raining. This was hard on the actors because they had to dress and do their makeup in a separate building and then cross an open driveway to get to the theater. It’s the only theater in the world, as far as I know, that doesn’t include dressing rooms. It’s a theater famous for leaving out space for actors to prepare and participate within its walls. The architect had forgotten to include them in his building plans.

Wind and rain are hard on costumes. They’re hard on shoes, hairdos, and morale as well. Dashing through a storm of falling wet leaves just before an entrance doesn’t contribute positively to one’s performance. It was particularly hard on me when, in my damp merry widow corset and my bare wet shoulders, I was fired between shows that afternoon.

Frank, the stage manager, couldn’t have been nicer. He was kind and spoke in a gentle voice when he told me that management was going to let me go. When I screamed “Why?” at him, he spoke even more softly. “They’re going to bring in someone tall who won’t look so much like you,” he said. “Two ingénues in the same play, especially if they resemble each other, are confusing to an audience. It’s like bald-headed actors. You don’t ever see two of them in a play together.” He was trying to make it easy for me.

“But we’re sisters!” I said. “Sisters resemble each other!”

The stage manager turned his empty palms toward me and looked helpless.

“Don’t sisters resemble each other?” I said again. He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and shuffled off as if they had fired him instead of me.

My replacement, whom they had been rehearsing secretly, was to go on for the final week in Philly. I had actually seen her across the street the day before, walking along laughing and chatting with a member of the cast. I thought she had come down to see him in the play. She’d even waved at me.

The humiliation caused my body to go numb. My head ached as if I were wearing an electrocution cap a size too small. My hands tingled as if to warn me of a heart attack. I sank in slow motion to my knees and then onto my forearms. Then I blacked out and lay sprawled on the cement floor in front of the call-board.

When I came to, I was lying on the union cot in the stage manager’s office with a cold compress on my forehead. Frank was staring down at me. He gave me a glass of water and held on to it while I drank so I wouldn’t spill it and get everything wet.

He said, “Are you pregnant?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Never been fired before, huh?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry, kid,” he said. “It happens to everybody.”

I walked slowly back through the rain, forgetting to protect my merry widow, the costume I was wearing when he fired me after the matinee. The world was ending for me. I had no place in it, no reason to be alive. I was a zero in a void.

The dressing rooms were empty. The rest of the cast had gone to supper. No one had waited for me.

I saw that I’d left my shoes on the dressing table, something you’re never supposed to do. It was bad luck, and I had never done it before. I put them on the floor and looked in the mirror. It occurred to me that five actors ahead of me had been fired in the course of rehearsals. The director had been fired. Now the producer had taken over the direction. My thoughts were tumbling over one another, and my gaze drifted down the line of beauty stations to where the other ingénue put on her makeup. Her chair was empty and seemed to be beckoning to me.

After changing into my street clothes, I sloshed across the driveway, kicking the puddles, and reentered the theater. I kept on through the dark auditorium, lit only by a work light onstage. At the back of the house, I knocked on the door of the producer’s office.

“Yes, what is it?” he said in his Prussian accent. I opened the door and went in. His glass eye was in his hand, and he was polishing it. He did this often, so it didn’t interrupt my concentration. I said, “Mr. Vonner, I noticed today that I am the sixth person you have fired from the show, and I was wondering—. If you were to fire anyone else, it would probably be Beverly Shaw’s turn. And if and when you do that, could I try out for her part?”

Mr. Vonner looked at me in a peculiar way, as if he had just been reminded of something he had forgotten to do. After a pause, he said, “I will think about it.” He took another pause, put his eye back in its socket, and sighed. “I’ll let you know.”

I made my debut on Broadway in that show, Moonbirds. It ran for two or three nights; I forget which.

The ingénue of my youth doesn’t exist today. She was gradually replaced by actresses like Cynthia Nixon and Meryl Streep, women with a sense of of entitlement and smarts, unlike a half a twin from a play running through the rain getting her costume soaked.

*       *       *

The world didn’t end after all. There was so much work around that year, I was soon hired again, this time to replace an actress who had gotten sick out of town.

Viva Madison Avenue starred Buddy Hackett, who took me to dinner as soon as I arrived. We had steaks served so hot that they were still sizzling when they were set in front of us. Buddy told me there was a phonograph under the plate playing sizzle sounds, and when I started to look, he said, “No, no, no! Don’t touch it! It’ll burn you!”

My joining the cast was so sudden that they didn’t have a costume for me. They had told me to bring along a couple of my own dresses, and I had chosen my favorite, a light, white wool dress that I thought would be perfect. I rehearsed with the stage manager, and when I met Buddy for our entrance at the door to the set, he looked at me and said, “Gee. That’s a dumb dress. What are you wearing such a dumb dress for? I don’t think I ever saw such a dumb dress!” I had just enough time to start feeling bad before we had to go on. He was trying to tell me in his own special way that if you wear white onstage, you attract all the attention and the audience won’t notice the star. I guess I knew what I was doing after all.

Buddy didn’t like the director, didn’t like his notes on the performance of the play, and used to hide from him. He didn’t like having to respond “Here!” at roll call. The first day I was there, when we were to meet for notes after the show, he hid behind the high-backed armchair in which I was sitting. I turned to remonstrate with him, and he went “Shh, shh, shh,” like a child playing hide-and-seek.

He’d call in sick to avoid rehearsal, and if the director found him, Buddy would pretend he had laryngitis and couldn’t talk. When we opened in New York, Buddy got a telegram from a friend that said, “I told you to wait in the car.” We closed after the second performance.

However, one learns from every experience. We got rewrites every night in this play, sometimes just before the curtain went up. I learned from Fred Stewart what to do if you go blank onstage and can’t remember your lines: Start coughing and pull out a handkerchief. Keep the coughing going into the handkerchief and add some gibberish until something occurs to you to say that sounds like a cue. Any two words will do. Say them and stop talking. Let the other actor get the play back on track. Fred was a genius at this. Actors used to show up early for their entrances to watch him from the wings every night.

*       *       *

The third play I was in that season was The Long Dream, adapted from a novel about a lynching in the south. Ketti Frings, the adapter, used to come to rehearsals in a mink coat that trailed along the floor behind her. This play also ran for three or four performances.

I was hired to understudy Barbara Loden. In the course of rehearsals, the producer, Cheryl Crawford, asked me to understudy Isabel Cooley as well. While four black college students in North Carolina were sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter waiting to be served, our producer was finding ways to avoid paying another salary. She must have thought she could get away with this because Isabel Cooley, a light-skinned black woman, was playing a character who was passing for white in the play.

The first time I saw Lloyd Richards, our director, he faced the stage, put his hands on the front of it—it was as high as his chest—and in one movement jumped up on it, landing on his feet. It was a simple, quiet, dramatic act that took my breath away. He called us all together on the stage to talk about the play. He spoke with passion of the time he was in the Army during WWII, stationed outside Biloxi, Mississippi. He went into town on his first Saturday night there and was literally kicked all the way back to the bus station by a bunch of white men. They told him that if he ever came back into town, they would kill him. “I was stationed there for two years and never once went back into town,” he said.

Then he astonished me by saying it would be our job to keep that story in mind during rehearsals, and outside of them as well. He didn’t want the blacks making friends with the whites in the cast. I was shocked by this. It was as if I hadn’t heard him right. Naïveté is hard to pierce, I was finding. I was a chrysalis concerned only with myself and being on a stage.

Lloyd was ahead of the times. He was a quiet leader who played not just close to the vest but deep inside his skin. This play was about a lynching; it was not just a melodrama. It was life, real and stark. Twenty-four/seven rehearsals were how he planned to get it onstage.

A week later, he asked me to put on black makeup and fill out a gospel choir scene in the play. The more black makeup I put on, the bluer my eyes appeared. It was apparent to the audience, an usher told me, as in “Wha’chu doin’ up there in that scene, girl?”

When I told Lloyd about my predicament, he said, “Wear a kerchief and turn upstage.” Eventually, he took me out of the scene. I think it was the producer’s idea. Lloyd was a patient man and let people make their own discoveries.

I don’t know how the black actors felt about my taking a job that should have gone to one of them. Their tolerance of me was a tribute to them, but it was all wrong.

One day, a group of us, disregarding Lloyd’s wishes, was standing around discussing where to go for supper during the break, and I said, “I have to run upstairs and take off my makeup.” One of the black actors said, “Gee, I wish I could do that.” He began rubbing his face like mad as he pretended to clean all the darkness off of it. Then he looked at his hands and said, “It’s not workin’,” and stood there thinking it over. Not long after that, Clarence Williams III became a major star on TV’s Mod Squad.

Lloyd became the head of the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, provided work for many black actors, and discovered the playwright August Wilson, whose plays he directed on Broadway in the years that followed.

*       *       *

All told, I think it was a total of seven nights in three plays on Broadway that season, although Jerry Tallmer of the Village Voice researched it and told me it was ten. Whatever. It was a time of living in three different worlds I had never known existed.

July 1954: If Only It Hadn’t Been Raining 

The night before I eloped, I knew it wouldn’t last. I was twenty-five, and it was the fifties. There was a lot of pressure. My brother Jim never got tired of warning me: “A girl can miss her market and end up on the shelf.” When he said this, I would picture myself sitting with the soda crackers and the oatmeal on the second shelf in the pantry, in the dim light that crept though the crack of the kitchen door. I didn’t want to get married just then, but “missing my market” was a harrowing thought. It brought up a visual of running for a departing ferry boat and jumping for the deck only to realize mid-leap that the boat was coming into the dock instead and that I was going to fall in the water in front of it.

I was still calling my mother in New Jersey every night to tell her that I had gotten home safe when I was really at Joe Allen’s or Downey’s or out partying. I had to move on, grow up, and get married so I wouldn’t have to lie to my mother on the phone at night from an apartment that wasn’t where I lived. What if she called back? Even though she never did, it was too nerve-wracking.

I married someone extraordinarily inappropriate. I didn’t tell anyone. I knew it wasn’t going to work. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t understand what they were doing back then. It was a time of transition from Margaret Sanger’s giving us the diaphragm to therapy’s arrival on the scene.

I had met Bill on the third floor of NBC at Rockefeller Center, where actors used the free phones to check their answering services. Anne Meara picked up when I called. She was always great because of the way she’d cheer me on with, “Nothing right now, Peggy,” as if the big one was right around the corner, probably coming in as we spoke. She filled me with hope. I’m glad she got out of there. When I run into her now, she always says, “I used to take messages for you,” as if some sort of miracle had occurred in her life for which I was responsible.

So I was sitting there in a phone booth, waiting for the surprise summer shower outside to stop, when this fellow came over to me and said, “Hi. How have you been?”

“Fine,” I said.

“I haven’t seen you since that party.”

I couldn’t place him. He was “a big lug,” an expression I’d heard only in a James Cagney movie, never in life. He was unforgettable, although I couldn’t have told you why. My knowledge of men was still pretty flimsy. I just looked up lug in the dictionary and found it comes from the Swedish luggo, which is something heavy that has to be dragged around.

“What party?” I said.

“The one in the Village.”

I’d never been to a party in the Village, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I talked to him for a while. We had some mutual friends, and when he offered to drive me home so I wouldn’t get wet in the rain, I said, “Okay. Thanks.”

He had a beat-up Cadillac convertible whose top didn’t work, a kind of oxymoron—a sign, perhaps, of the way that a car reflects its owner’s personality. When I sneezed, he said there were Kleenex in the glove compartment, but when I opened it, four hundred dollars worth of traffic tickets fell into my lap. He said he was going to pay them off the following day, but he didn’t get the chance. The car was impounded when he came in to get a glass of water at my place. He didn’t have the money to get the car out of the impound and was afraid he might be arrested as a scofflaw if he showed up in traffic court without a lawyer, which of course he couldn’t afford.

Somehow, I felt responsible. I married him.

Years later, my brother, Jim, reminiscing about Bill, said, “We all liked Bill. There was never a dull moment with him around. He just had that one little flaw.”

“What was that?” I said.

Jim, holding himself very still and not looking at me, said in a voice I could barely hear, “Well, he stole.”

It was true. Bill did steal. He stole everything from brass salt and pepper shakers to antique furniture. I didn’t think of it then, but it occurred to me recently that I’d married the kidnapper who had frightened my parents back in the prologue—a classic case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I lived in a world of acting classes, auditions, and theaters. I thought Bill could change. He had energy, dreams, and taste, but no background or credits. He hadn’t finished high school, but he’d learned how to survive on his own. His parents had not been there for him, and he had actually made up a father to tell me about—a circus clown who had looked out for him for a while.

I didn’t know that people don’t change. They get better, or they get worse. When Bill crested and became a smuggler, dipping into dope on the side, he succeeded in convincing an upper-crust Madison Avenue dealer to buy half of an Aztec frieze from Mexico. Bill promised he’d get him the other half on his next trip. Even I knew by then that there never was another half. He was going to get caught soon, get arrested, and go to jail.

I felt paralyzed. Bill always had a cover story, which I always believed. I was the only one who did believe him, but nobody around us ever set me straight. I felt I couldn’t abandon him. Abandonment was a deep issue for me. I got over it with Bill.

One day, I came home from a summer stock job, put my suitcase down, and, too tired to unpack, just left it there. Sometime later, Bill said in a voice that sounded odd, gentle for him, forlorn even, “Do you think you could move your suitcase out of the kitchen? Maybe unpack it? It’s been sitting there for a year.”

I told my friend Cynthia about what I was going through, and she said, “Oh, that happened to me, too. My first marriage, I kept a bag packed with everything I needed for a trip in it. I could pick it up and leave with it anytime, day or night, zip right out the door if things didn’t work out.”

“What did you do with your toothbrush and lingerie drying in the bathroom?”

“Baggies,” she said.

That did it. I’d had enough of being married. I wasn’t about to go to jail with him.