atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (9 page)

My life was a nightmare. I had no one to talk to. My understudy wouldn’t speak to me, and the wardrobe mistress was a gossip who complained to me when she found greasy handprints on my uniform. The guys were giving me friendly little hugs in the darkness of the wings before I went on. The only other female in the company was a goat named Daisy. I was a mess. My mother’s words, “I have every confidence in you,” gave me headaches. I was in a jam. I’d never been in a jam before.

I was brought up low Episcopalian, with an easygoing, folksy minister. His name was Dr. White, and he had a head of hair so full and white it would almost blind you as he delivered his sermon in the shaft of light from the church window. My mother had appealed to him, distraught that my father was planning never to attend church with her. Early the next Sunday, Dr. White drove up our driveway, got out of his car, and called to my father, who was digging in the rose garden.

“Dr. Pope, it’s Dr. White, and it’s time for church!” He then went into the rose garden and had a quiet talk with my father, at the end of which Dad decided he would go to church that Sunday.

So in Kansas—or was it Iowa?—I looked up the Episcopalian church and made an appointment with Reverend Boose. I saw him in his library. It was nice being inside a home instead of a hotel. There was a fire going, a lot of beautifully bound books, a vase of roses, and an Oriental carpet that reminded me of Montclair. A friendly black-and-tan cocker spaniel greeted me and then sat on a cushion to bear witness to my story.

Reverend Boose wore silver-rimmed glasses that reflected the firelight. His hair was thinning. I liked his smile and the fact that he listened to me as if he had all day. I ranted. I raved. I told him about my mother, sitting in a three-story house all alone except for Molly, my dog, who was very old by then. I told him about my dream of becoming an actress, about my need for freedom. I told him I thought I might die onstage one night and have to fall back on my degree after all. That’s what they would put on my tombstone: “She fell back on her degree.”

“I can feel myself falling, falling. I’m a failure! There’s something wrong with me! I wish I were dead!” Suddenly, Reverend Boose jumped out of his chair, grabbed my wrists, and pulled me over to the fireplace. Before I knew it, we were both down on our knees, praying in front of the leaping flames—to remind me of hell, I guess.

“Do you know the Lord’s Prayer?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Let’s say it together,” he said.

When we had finished, he said a prayer on his own in Latin and asked God to “look out for Peggy, one of his children struggling to follow the right path in life. Let her not be led astray by forces around her pulling her in the wrong direction.”

He asked me if I would like to add anything or say a prayer myself. Nothing came to me, so we had some tea and cookies and talked about how spring was coming. As I left, he said, “Remember: It’s not what happens to you, it’s what happens within you that counts.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. When I got back home after the tour was over, I wrote him a letter to tell him I had been thinking about him, but it came back unopened and marked “Deceased.”

I continued to shake during the play. Finally, I confided in one of the sailors in the cast, one I felt safe with because the only kind of woman he was attracted to romantically had to be plump. He loved plump women. I know this because he told me one day when we were sitting on the bus waiting for the light to change. He saw a beautiful, plump woman waiting on the sidewalk and said, “I wish we were in town for one more day. I’m mad about her.” After the light turned green and he knew he would never see her again, he said, “I think my mother was frightened by a Rubens painting when she was carrying me.”

I called him up soon after that and asked him to meet me in the hotel coffee shop. I needed to talk. He was a gentle soul who, when I told him my troubles, became quite indignant and said, “That son of a bitch.” I asked him, “Tom, can you see me shaking in the scene when I’m on the hatch?”

“Nope. I never noticed,” he said.

“I’m shaking so hard sometimes I feel like I’m going to fall over. I’m not tough enough to be an actress!”

Tom didn’t respond right away. He considered. He ate some of his toast. He took a sip of coffee. Then he said, “Did you know that human beings are built to fall over?”

“Uh, no.”

“Sure. We’re built like an inverted triangle: tiny base, getting larger at the shoulder. He took a pencil from his shirt pocket and drew an upside down isosceles triangle on the place mat in front of him. Then he drew it tipping over, added arms and legs to it and my head on its base, hair flying, with a cartoon balloon that said, “Help!” He was sitting opposite me and drew the whole picture upside down. He made me laugh. Then he said, “Did you know that 50 percent of all human endeavors fail?”

“No.”

“Abraham Lincoln was defeated at the polls several times and never held public office until he was elected president. Knowing that keeps me going.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

Then he said, “Would you like me to pretend to be your boyfriend so he’ll leave you alone?”

“Oh, Tom, thank you. Thank you very much, but nobody would believe us. I’m way too thin.”

I hadn’t told Tom that I was attracted to Horace and ashamed of it. I had said all I was able to. His offer and his kindness during that god-awful delayed adolescence I was experiencing helped me to keep going, and gradually I was taken into the cast as one of them. I wasn’t a girl to be hit on anymore. Everybody had my number, and I stopped shaking. The trade-off was that, when we went out after the show, women the guys had picked up from town joined us. We’d be sitting around a table, and every time one of these women excused herself to go “freshen up,” the guys would all stand up as a courtesy. When I got up to go, nobody moved.

Back in New York, we were booked on the Subway Circuit, a series of vaudeville houses that were offering plays in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Josh Logan came to see us. He sat through the whole performance and came backstage to congratulate us. “What a show. What a great show!” he said. “Unbelievable show! No matter what you do to it, you can’t kill it.”

“Baptism by fire,” said Sara Enright as she squashed her hat onto her head and got ready to go home to the Hotel Gorham on Fifty-Fifth Street.

At twenty-two, I felt burned out. I spent the next several months having trouble breathing and feeling a never-ending fatigue. Finally, I got another job, another chance. I jumped at it.

Madame Modjeska Gives Me the Nod 

I was gun-shy after my experience on the road. My knowledge of the world remained shaky. I stammered at auditions when I read for a part. My one credit as the nurse in the fifth and last national company of Mr. Roberts didn’t impress anybody on the summer stock circuit. I was back auditioning for the same part and not getting it.

“They get their girlfriends,” said Sara, my seen-everything agent. “They don’t like the idea of someone who’s done the part. They want to direct a blank slate.”

Am I ever going to work again? I wondered. I spotted an ad in the trades for an ingénue in a play that would tour the Catskills and showed it to Sara.

“Stanley Wolf Players? You want to work for him? He plays hotels. Takes Broadway hits and shortens them to fill the time between dinner and the mambo lesson. Tony Curtis started there. Go ahead. Let me know what happens.”

She crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it in the area of her wastebasket. Her dismissal of Stanley Wolf caused me to lose my fear. I went to the audition and got the job.

Stanley Wolf, entrepreneur of the Catskills, produced, cast, and directed eight shows a summer, playing simultaneously. The actors lived together in a mansion provided by Mr. Wolf in Libertyville, New York, and while Mr. Wolf rode around in a puce Cadillac convertible with the top down, we went out on buses every day to play the surrounding hotels. It was my second job on my journey to self-knowledge and freedom, and the play was going so badly that Mrs. Wolf had to lock and guard the doors to prevent the audience from leaving the theatre early.

Stanley Wolf got mad at us.

“You’re all sliding around in shit on that stage!” he said. “When you have a funny line, turn front and say it loud. This is a comedy, damn it!”

He replaced the leading man. It worked. The new fellow lifted the play out of the swamp. He was a real actor: older, experienced, and an expert, not like the rest of us novices. When I helped him with his lines, which he learned in two days, I noticed he had silver threads running through his sideburns. He took a shine to me and made me laugh when he told me about himself.

“The neighborhood liquor store always knows how I’m doing,” he said. “When I’m flush, I buy champagne. When I’m not, I buy beer. When I’m scraping bottom, I buy their cheapest Gallo wine in the jug.”

His name was Phil, and he wore city clothes—a brown jacket and gray pants. He didn’t have resort clothes, jeans, or shorts, or the usual summer camp attire we all wore. He didn’t even have a bathing suit. He was a grown-up, a man, the real goods. I didn’t know exactly what he was doing in our midst. Looking back, I think he must have needed money, was at some crossroads in his life, or was trying to quit drinking. I was too young for these thoughts to occur to me. I simply thought he was a miracle, and I fell madly in love with him. My mom’s forebodings were getting smudged in my memory and would soon be erased.

He was magnificent in the play when he took over, despite the lack of rehearsal. Nobody walked out, and Mrs. Wolf was able to get back to riding in the puce Cadillac with Stanley. The playwright had been a bit redundant. On the second night, Phil left out two scenes because the lines he was saying in the first act were repeated in the second. He jumped ahead, right across the intermission, and we got back to the mansion a half-hour early.

We went to the cellar cafe to unwind. It was a bare room with a jukebox and a makeshift wooden bar where beer and Cokes were served. Random tables and chairs left the floor open for dancing later. The only attempt at décor was a poster of Madame Modjeska, the Polish diva, who had immigrated to America in the late 1800s. One of her specialties was that she could sit on a stage and make an audience weep buckets when she read the phone book. In the poster, she wore a low-cut red gown of the same period and sat in the same kind of chair as Grandmother Pope, who had looked down on us from over the fireplace in Montclair.

Madame Modjeska was curvy and lush, with feathers in her red hair and romance blooming on her face. This great Shakespearean actress filled me with awe. She inspired me and conveyed with her pose that she would take up with only the most desirable of men.

Phil spiked his beer with a shot of Wild Turkey from a flask he kept in his jacket. I sat across from him at a small table in the dimly lit room. From the jukebox came Jo Stafford singing an off-key version of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

“That doesn’t sound right,” I said.

“She’s doing it on purpose,” said Phil.

“Oh? How come?”

“It’s funny,” he said. “Listen. She misses beats too. Or puts too many in. Hear it?”

“Yeah…”

“It’s a send-up of bad lounge singers in the Midwest. I’m not kidding. I have the record, and there’s a picture on the sleeve of two left hands playing the piano.”

“Oh,” I laughed. “How clever.”

“Do you know your eyes have flecks of gold in them?

“Oh, c’mon.” Horace flashed in my brain, said Oh, excuse me, and made a quick exit.

“It’s just beautiful the way they catch the light, green eyes flecked with gold.”

On the wall behind Phil, a large roach hiked across Modjeska’s bosom.

“Want some bourbon in your beer?” he said.

“Um, no, thanks. This is fine.” I wiped the beer rings from the table with a paper napkin. The café was filling up with actors from Mr. Wolf’s other shows. Johnny Dayton, the most outgoing member of all the troupes, stopped by our table and said, “Go for it, kids,” before he took off after Regina, who was still wearing her Indian makeup and headband. Glasses clinked, an occasional guffaw erupted, and there was Mary Ellen holding forth with anecdotes in her Southern Comfort drawl that promised not to cease before closing. The voices and laughter of the actors rose above the music.

“Don’t move,” said Phil. “I’ll be right back.”

Rita had been eyeing Phil from the bar. She tugged at her skintight skirt, which snapped back at her as she started over. When she got to the table, she said, “I’m playing the nurse in Mr. Roberts.”

“I was in that on the road,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? Who was your leading man?”

When I told her, she said, “I slept with him.”

“Oh,” I said.

We didn’t seem to have anything more in common. I watched her as she prowled off and gave myself an aside.

What a vampire. She’s stalking my man. I wonder how Madame Modjeska would deal with such insolence.

When Phil returned, he said, “It’s hot in here. Shall we go for a walk?”

“But, uh…,” I said. “Let’s be real casual so nobody—”

“But of course.”

Outside, he took my hand, and I felt the breeze surf across the goose bumps on my arms and legs. There was no moon, but the stars were out.

“There’s the Big Dipper,” I said.

“And the North Star.”

“Oh, look. Cassiopeia’s chair!”

“Hey, shooting star!”

“Where?” As I turned my head to see, my lips ran into his.

“You missed it,” he said.

“Oh.”

An owl hooted, “Ooh. Oo.” A dog barked as we snuck across the driveway gravel. A pebble slipped between my sandal and my foot and found a resting place between my toes.

“It’s chilly,” I said.

“Let’s go in the bus,” he replied.

“Well—.” It was like going into the ocean just before a wave breaks.

“Come on.”

We couldn’t push the door open, so we had to pry it with our fingers. It creaked as it gave. We got in and felt our way to the back. The seat wheezed as we sat on it. A tear in the leather scratched the backs of my legs.

We talked softly and drank Wild Turkey. I couldn’t smell it on his breath anymore, and I was no longer chilly. I hiccuped. I giggled. I breathed and held my breath. He laughed and talked on in a low voice that wrapped around me like the sound of a cello. Before he put his arm around me, he placed the flask on the floor. When I nestled into him, his jacket scratched my cheek. His face felt cool against mine. He kissed me. Outside, a bird called, a mourning dove. I heard a bee buzz behind the seat. The Wild Turkey tipped over and spilled onto the floor.

*       *       *

“What’s that glowing?” I asked sometime later.

“Someone’s turned on the porch floodlight.”

“On us?”

“Looks like,” said Phil, peering through the window. “It’s the company manager, whatshisname.”

“Angus.”

“Yeah.”

“You think he’s going to wait there to see who gets off?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Phil, my mother asked him to look out for me,” I said.

“Oh. Sorry, kid.”

“What am I gonna do?”

“Tell you what. I’ll get off the bus by myself and have a few words with old Angus, tell him I needed some time alone, and after I get him inside, you skin on up to your room.”

“And he’s going to believe you were rocking this bus all by yourself?”

“Never know till you try, kid.”

As I crept up the back stairs of the mansion, I thought about Madame Modjeska, about her beginnings and about mine. How long is my climb to be?

When I got to my door, I saw Rita in the hall.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

There was no fooling her. She saw right through me as if I had stolen candy from her. I assumed what I thought would be one of Madame’s grander poses, one hand on my bosom, the other on the doorknob.

“Oh, just getting some air,” I said. “It was so close in the café, don’cha know?”

I parted my lips and flashed her a smile of forbearance. With a diva’s circular wave to her adoring audience, ending with a light stab in the air and a gesture somewhere between “V for Victory” and “Up yours,” I was gone.