atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (12 page)

Heroes 

I met Elaine Stritch on Trials of O’Brien, an early sixties New York TV show starring Peter Falk. Well, I sort of met her. She was pointed out to me. Nobody told Peter Falk who I was either, which was perhaps just as well. I would probably have looked him in his bad eye and gotten off on the wrong foot. Nobody was actually introduced on that show. My guess is that it was a new show. TV shows of this kind were usually done in LA, so there was a lot riding on its being a success and attracting more TV series to the East Coast. There was much to do and little time. Introductions were not high on the list.

I was excited and frightened, as was my wont. I was in the unknown, in which the questions Will I do well? Will I get it right? Will I mess up? hovered around me like dragonflies. I had the job, didn’t I? I was only there for the day. They didn’t have time to fire me. Of course, they could fire me whenever they wanted to, but luckily, I didn’t know that at the time.

A striking blonde was pacing back and forth in a cocky way on the set, which was the wide hallway of a hospital with lots of people moving purposefully here and there. It was Elaine, a regular on the series. I didn’t know anything more about her than that she belonged. In the midst of her striding and my wandering, our paths crossed. Neither of us stopped, but as we grazed each other’s territory, Elaine growled out of the side of her mouth in my direction, “Everybody’s scared.” She only had to say it once. I looked around the set and fantasized everyone shaking with terror. I felt better. It’s a great thing to learn—one of life’s sweet, shocking facts.

Our paths have crossed again over the years, and Elaine always stops to talk now. I particularly like the story she tells in her one-woman show about the actor who quit drinking. For years, he stood in the wings before his entrance with a glass of booze, which he would then bring onstage with him. Finally, he stopped cold turkey. When he called it to the attention of an old drinking buddy, his buddy said, “You goin’ on alone?”

Barbara Cook, whom I’ve known since the fifties, sat next to me at Christmas dinner a few years ago and said, “You know, Peggy, I’m seventy-two now, and for the first time in my life, I feel really comfortable with myself.”

The Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman writes in his book that he woke up at four o’clock every morning of his life scared. But he always got up and went to work. Liv Ullmann, his wife, says in her book that when he had a nightmare, he would wake her up to tell her about it. She always listened because she knew she would be in a film about it the next year.

In the sixties, Arlene Francis, who starred on the TV show What’s My Line?, had to deal with various accidents in her life, including in the same year a flowerpot that fell off her windowsill and killed a stranger walking by underneath and her chauffeur’s running over a pedestrian. Neither accident involved Miss Francis personally, but it was still a pretty bad year for her since she was a celebrity and the newspapers covered these events like drooling jackals.

I was once in a car with Woody Allen, driving to the Catskills to see an improv group in which a mutual friend was appearing. He had been invited to serve as the emcee on What’s My Line? and introduce Arlene Francis. He mentioned his current nightmare was that he would refer to her as “Arlene Francis, that famous murderess.” But he didn’t, and in fact she wasn’t, so it all went well.

Roscoe Lee Browne, the golden-voiced Jamaican actor, helped me out in rehearsal one day when my work was a shambles, my life wasn’t going well, and my relationship with the director was definitely off. I was in deep trouble all around. On a break, I went over to Roscoe and addressed him as the exemplar of wisdom that I thought he was.

“Roscoe, what do you do with your demons?”

He paused. “I invite them in,” he said, “and offer them tea.”

Maureen 

I was still in high school when I saw Maureen Stapleton in her Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. Twenty years later, I was in the revival with her. She got two separate rounds of applause on her first entrance. Fresh out of rehab—she called it “the funny farm”—she got a hand for being there in the first place. Then there would be a pause as the audience realized that she had lost sixty pounds since they had last seen her, and she was looking sexy as hell moving around on that stage in a white slip. They applauded her again for that every single night.

I watched her every night from the wings. How did she do it? I didn’t have a clue. Her performance poured out of her spontaneously each time; it was real, full of magnetism, and always new. At the bows, before they knew what they were doing, the audience rose together and cheered. Today this is a routine formality, but back then it was rare. Audiences did it only when they were moved by greatness.

During rehearsal, when I would ask some question of the director, Maureen would burst in with, “Don’t think, Peggy! Don’t think! Just say the words!” Now I know what that means. Then, I was still trying to figure out everything in my head. I believe Maureen started out spontaneous, or got there very quickly. She was an amazing actress with a heaping measure of passion.

I thought it odd that she needed the stage manager to walk her to the wings every night of the run. She was afraid to go onstage. She was afraid to fly in a plane, which made a film career difficult. I believe her life was one confrontation after another with deep fear. But once in the fray, spontaneity was her armor and friend, and with a quick joke, she was off to battle.

We played the Billy Rose Theatre, which was just around the corner from Times Square. On New Year’s Eve, the limo that called for Maureen every night failed to arrive. When she came out and it wasn’t there, she sat down on the curb in her fur coat and started swearing a blue streak. It was a natural thing to do. You do two shows, you’re onstage the whole day, and you come out to find no limo.

“#s#%/#x*+##%x* *” she said.

I hung around and watched for the car, and when it seemed a hopeless thing, I approached a cab and asked the driver to help. He was taking a couple to the Port Authority two blocks away. I asked if they would be good enough to share the next two blocks with the “First Lady of the American Theater” so she could then take the cab home. They agreed somewhat reluctantly. The cabbie said, “So where is she?”

“Oh, she’s right over there,” I said as I pointed to what by then looked like a bag lady in a beat-up fur coat sitting on a curb next to a couple of paper bags, cussing in high dudgeon.

The taxi group became totally quiet and went into shocked-stare mode. I rushed over to get Maureen and her secretary. They squeezed into the cab and were off before there was a chance for a change of mind.

As the cab drew away, the limo pulled up. What to do? “Why don’t we take it up to O’Neill’s?” suggested my friend John, who had been watching the scene. “It’s been paid for.”

And that, I confess, dear reader, is what we did—and, may I add, some bystanders applauded.

I think if Maureen had seen this, she would have roared, “That’s it, Peggy! That’s the idea!”

Intimacy 

I won a prize for acting long ago when the Obies were given out at the Village Gate, a theater on Bleecker Street. It was summer, and I was wearing a white dress, sitting at a bare table with the cast of the play in which I was appearing. We were having hamburgers, salad, and beer. The prize was for Distinguished Acting in an Off-Broadway Show. The show was called Muzeeka by John Guare. When my name was announced, I felt my face go out of control, moving every which way at once. It had a mind of its own, seeming not to be a part of me at all yet staying attached to my head, carrying on in a disjointed dance for a while before it finally calmed down. It really alarmed me. I didn’t want anyone to see this and didn’t know what it meant. It has just occurred to me now, as I’m writing this, that I was way too shy to win a prize, to be singled out as a winner. And it was my face, feeling cornered, that struggled to tell me this. Luckily, the rest of me stayed in the room.

In the show, I played a hooker in the Village who specialized in Chinese basket jobs. Okay, the Chinese basket job is the ultimate form of impersonal sex, sort of a reverse kama sutra. It involves a basket big enough to accommodate a woman sitting cross-legged in it. There is a hole cut in the center of the basket, and the woman sits over it. The man lies underneath while the basket and woman spin slowly around on top of him. They have sex through the basket and don’t ever have to touch each other in any other way.

In Muzeeka, we had a low budget for sets, so we had to stylize everything. We used a double-decker bed from St. Vincent de Paul’s thrift shop. A flat piece of wood suggested the basket and hung from the bottom of the upper bunk. An actor doubling as a kabuki stagehand did the turning as I lay on my stomach eating an apple and delivering a monologue to the audience about Martha Raye and Vietnam while Sam Waterston had an orgasm. We never touched at all.

The hooker had printed cards that said:

EVELYN LANDIS

CHINESE BASKET JOB, YOU LIKE?

With a phone number here

Guare had seen this message in graffiti on the wall of a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place, and it inspired him to write a play about Vietnam.

I would hand out these cards to audience members during my exit up the aisle, but Sally Ordway got pretty pissed off because it was her phone number on the card. It was just a joke, but nobody remembered to change it when Samuel French published the play. I ran into Sally recently. She’s an old lady now, and she’s still fuming about it.

When my name was called and my face started leaping around, I got up to get the award but then sat down again and asked our director, Melvin: “Was that my name they said?” He said, “Yes! Get up there, bitch!” So I went to the front of the room and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” and gave Estelle Parsons, who was handing out the award, a big hug that made her wince. Someone told me later that she didn’t like to be touched, but she’s in a funny business if that’s true.

Intimacy—it’s tricky.

Dave 

There was a character named Dave who used to plant himself outside Sardi’s. He wore a brown jacket that wouldn’t stay buttoned, and he would call out in a rust-coated voice to people going in for lunch or dinner, “Who are you? Are you anyone?”

Celia, his sometime buddy, clutching her shopping bags, would shout, “Forget him! He’s nobody!”

Dave found out who everybody was. He called me Miss Pope and asked for my autograph every time he saw me. Once he asked me if I’d get him James Caan’s autograph the next time I went out to the coast.

“It’s a hard one to get, and I really need it,” he said. ‘I’d go out there myself, but I can’t get away just now.”

He always had two or three copies of Players Guide with him, each one with pictures of about two thousand actors in it. When I asked him why he needed more than one guide, he said, “Those are my backups!”

Everybody who worked in the theater district knew Dave. He was even written up in The New Yorker once. The reporter followed him around for about two hours. The only celebrity spotted during that time was me, but they put it in “Goings On About Town” anyway.

Dave had a job at a dairy in Astoria, but when I saw him a few years ago, he told me he didn’t work there anymore. The last time I saw him, he’d aged and was looking like the guys at the OTB on Seventy-Second Street—seedy, shabby, unshaven. I had tried to duck him, but he saw me and started calling, “Miss Pope! Miss Pope! I need to ask you something!” So I stopped. He didn’t have his Players Guides with him. He came over and said, “Miss Pope, could you lend me a quarter?”

Then I never saw him again.

Ann Miller 

Acting with Ann Miller was like being in a Woody Allen movie where the lead character steps out of the frame and starts performing in the midst of strangers. A living piece of celluloid accustomed to acting only when the camera was on her, she stood or sat politely, her whole body totally still, expressing nothing while I said my lines. Then she’d burst into glorious song and dance. It was the closest I ever came to being in a Busby Berkeley musical.

I had the opportunity of making her wince once or twice during the song I sang to her. There was a high B flat in it, which I couldn’t always find when I wanted to. Ann’s eyes would go crazy at that. The wince was minimal and involuntary; the rest of her never moved. It was her long, thick, fake eyelashes that betrayed her. They fluttered up and down like the shutter on a camera when the film runs out. As I persisted in pursuing my fleeing note, I would see tiny chips of celluloid reflecting the light as they flew off of her. She was a good sport, however, and never commented on my faulty singing. She seemed to like me and trust me as the principal player that I actually was.

At that time, I was frightened of singing. I had no idea how one got all the pitches straight, especially in a song of two and a half octaves. I actually had a good ear and a sense of musicality, but if I got too frightened, I’d hold my breath and go deaf and sing any old thing. When the heavyset character woman with the big voice in the ensemble said, “Why don’cha let me sing your songs for you from the wings and you could lip-synch ‘em?”, I knew I was in some real trouble. I was saved when a young girl in braids and braces from the crew came up to me and said her father was a hypnotist and had helped a few singers with this problem.

I said, “Take me to him.”

He had a machine with a spiral maze inked on it. When he turned it on, the maze spun around and I went straight under as he talked to me in a soft, confident voice. “Relax, relax, relax. You are going into a light sleep now. You will remember everything I say, and when you wake up feeling refreshed, you will no longer be frightened. You will know that you can sing perfectly, with every note on pitch.” He kept on talking like that. The only thing I wasn’t aware of was time. I don’t know how long it took for him to convince me of what he was telling me, but I doubt it took any longer than it takes a stage magician. The man was a real magician. That night and for the rest of the run, I sang just fine. I will always be grateful to Ann Miller and her beautiful eyelashes.

She didn’t seem to have any fear at all. She had been hired to take over the role of Mame on Broadway, having never been on a live stage with lines before. “Never mind,” said the producers, who got a second company together for her to practice with down in Florida. In six weeks and five wigs, she was not just talking but singing, dancing, acting, and fast-changing. She did it—just did it! She was a phenomenon. She sweated a lot and made good use of the five wigs, which got changed between dances. Her only questions involved technical aspects. One day, she said, “Tell me, Peggy, what are the flies?” I told her it was the area above the stage where they “flew” the sets up out of view when they weren’t being used. She looked up into the darkness, said, “Oh, my,” and decided she didn’t really need to know that. I decided not to tell her about lights and things falling down from them, and we went on with rehearsal.

She asked Phillip, the stage manager, if they could lay down a tap board for her thirty-two-taps-a-second dance in the first act. He said, “Well, it would require stagehands coming on in the middle of the scene to do that. It would take the momentum out of things.”

She said, “Oh, my friend Eleanor Powell’s a got a small tap board in her garage. I could ask her to send it to me.”

“Miss Miller,” the stage manager said, “it would take at least a half-hour no matter what the size, and the union would be hard-pressed to do it without going into overtime.” Although she was very disappointed, she was a good sport about that too.

Ann never did understand curtain calls in those days of pulleys and hand-pulled curtains. Our theater’s curtain had a twenty-pound iron bar in its hem to make it fall fast, and it was important not to be in the way when it came down. The stage manager was in charge of giving the curtain puller the cue to raise and bring down this monster. The drill was as follows: curtain goes up; we all bow; featured players step forward, bow, and step back; Ann Miller, the last to go, steps forward, bows, steps back; curtain falls; nobody’s decapitated.

To look out at the audience in Fort Lauderdale was to behold a sea of white hair, which rose up immediately at the end of the show, each whitecap heading for its own limo as fast as possible. At the very first curtain call, what we saw was an audience already on its feet. Ann, excited by what she thought was a standing ovation, stepped out under the descending curtain to take another bow, totally forgetting to wait for Phil’s cue. Harry, the curtain puller, had to jump up and throw his entire weight onto the rope of the half-descended curtain about to slam onto the star’s head and kill her. This kept happening as we kept getting more and more “standing ovations.” One day Ann cried out, “Eighteen! We had eighteen curtain calls! Isn’t that something!” She didn’t notice that her huge black wig was askew. Harry had been a fraction late. She never realized as we walked offstage that day that Harry was being carried away in an ambulance with a serious hernia.

In my role as Agnes Gooch, I was inspired by Mame’s stirring speech, in which she said, “Life’s a banquet and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death! You’ve got to go out there and live! Live! Live!” So Agnes follows her advice. About eight and a half months later, she comes back hugely pregnant to ask in song, “What do I do now?”

The stage had been redecorated in a Japanese vein. The only furniture was a very, very low bench. When Mame tells me to sit down, it’s a funny sight gag. Trying to balance my great stomach as I bend my knees, reaching behind me, sinking ever more slowly down, down, down. I finally hit home plate. It had occurred to me during rehearsal that it would be even funnier if I missed the bench altogether. However, I couldn’t seem to manage it. I kept thinking about it and working on it, and finally, about three weeks into the run, I ended up on the floor, really surprising myself. I was right. It was so funny that even the musicians in the pit cracked up, and the show sort of came to a halt because the audience couldn’t stop laughing. I was laughing, and Ann couldn’t say her next line. It was very hard for her, as she was religious about keeping still while another actor was acting. I hadn’t thought about that, and I ask her forgiveness now, late as it is.

I know she called Peg Murray, the actress playing her co-star, in the middle of the night and, without saying hello, started right in with, “Is she going to do that again?” Peg, the soul of wisdom, told her not to worry and to just mention it to the stage manager.

I only did it that once.