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C
INDERELLA
ENDED ITS
run in March, and I was not expected to leave for America until August. In the interim, Charlie Tucker told me that he had an offer for me to play an American girl from the South in a new “play with music” called
Mountain Fire.
I had always hoped to try legitimate theater, and here I was being asked to do a play. “Legit” at last!

I met the director, Peter Cotes, and his wife, Joan Miller, in their Kensington apartment. I think they hired me because I was the appropriate age and suitably nubile—it certainly wasn’t for my Southern accent, which was, quite frankly, appalling.

The play, set in the mountains of Tennessee, was a dark, sad allegory based on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It was written by Bill Birney and Howard Richardson, who had also written the very successful
Dark of the Moon
.

I began to work on my role with Joan Miller. She tried to help me find the nuances that were needed for the part, but true to form—as with sad songs and the dreadful screen test—the emotions consumed me. The result was floods of tears, every day. I dreaded going to work.

Gillian Lynne, the now-famous choreographer of such triumphs as
Cats
and
The Phantom of the Opera
, played a young, wanton girl in the show. Jerry Wayne, who played the traveling salesman who seduced my character, Becky, was attractive, but at the time he was on a health kick, and he ate garlic until it was coming out of his ears. His clothing, breath, hair, everything reeked—and we had love scenes together. Someone told me that if you eat garlic in self-defense, you don’t notice it on someone
else, so I began to eat a lot of garlic myself. It didn’t make the slightest difference, except to make other members of the company keep their distance from us both.

The music was by Stefan de Haan, a charming man, about fifteen years older than I, who also served as our musical director. He was European, erudite, shy, and fun. Our director couldn’t decide whether he wanted the orchestra in the pit or offstage, or no orchestra at all. This was a play, after all, so he then thought maybe one instrument, a guitar, would be enough. We tried the show a different way every night.

Peter still wasn’t satisfied. He thought maybe the musical introductions to the songs were impeding the flow of the story. Seeking to help, I made a suggestion.

“I’ve got perfect pitch. Perhaps I could just start my songs myself and the accompaniment could creep in later?”

Peter looked at me blankly. “But what about everybody else?”

“Ah! Well, I don’t know about everybody else,” I said, “but certainly in the duet with Jerry, for instance, I could hum his note quietly for him. He could pick it up from me and continue on.”

We tried it that night. At the appropriate moment I hummed the note for Jerry, and he said, “What?”

“Hmmmm,” I repeated, a little louder, hoping the audience wouldn’t hear me. Needless to say, he never found the note, and it was a disaster.

The truth was, the play was not good, and although the company tried to make it work, we all sensed it was going to be a flop. I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that had the eminent London critic Kenneth Tynan seen my performance, it would have been the end of any career I hoped to have. Mercifully,
Mountain Fire
folded out of town.

The American producer of
The Boy Friend
, Cy Feuer, came to see the show before it closed, and when he visited me backstage, the only thing he managed to say to me about the play or my part in it was, “
You’ve
got perfect pitch!” He was a sparkling, jovial man with a freckled face and a sandy crew cut that made his head look like a bullet. I liked him immediately.

Speaking of perfect pitch, my mother had it, too. We would often play the game of “Guess That Note.” Actually, only Mum’s pitch was perfect—
mine is merely relative, meaning that I hear middle C in my head (having always begun my scales on that note), then I judge other notes by their distance from that. The interesting thing is that as the years went by, I regularly won the game, and Mum—who had been so right initially—was a whole tone flat. We would both stomp into the living room and hammer at the piano keys to prove our point. Ironically, these days my sense of pitch has also lowered. I guess everything drops with age!

WHILE WE WERE
on the road with
Mountain Fire
, I began a friendship with a young Canadian actor in the play named Neil McCallum. He was very accomplished and had an endearing, asymmetrical face. Our relationship quickly blossomed into romance.

That July, after the show closed, Neil, Stefan, Aunt Joan, and I took a small vacation together. We rented a little riverboat and journeyed up the Thames. Auntie and Stefan got on very well, and she became an unspoken chaperone for Neil and me. We made a compatible foursome.

The boat was a little cabin cruiser, about thirty feet in length. We had a bunk each, and there was a small shower and head. Neil and Stefan were in charge of all things nautical. Auntie and I made beds, set out breakfast, put out the fenders and ropes, and generally made ourselves useful. In the evenings we moored on the towpath and went to a local pub for supper, or cooked aboard in the tiny galley.

For ten pleasant days we headed toward Oxford and then back. The sun shone occasionally, but mostly it poured with rain. We didn’t care—it was an adventure.

Neil came down to The Meuse and was very kind to my brothers, even building Chris a swing in the garden. Shortly before I was due to leave for the United States, Neil had to return to Canada. I said to my mother, “Mum, I want to go down to Southampton to see him aboard his ship.” She said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

But my compulsion to be with him until the very last moment was too strong. Against her instincts and wishes, I said, “Mum, I
have
to do this. I’ll be back in the morning once he’s gone.”

So I went. I knew my mother was concerned.

On the train down to Southampton, my time of the month suddenly
and surprisingly commenced with a vengeance. I was mortified—and maybe a tad relieved. Neil and I spent the night together, but it was purely platonic. It must have been frustrating as hell for him. He promised that when I got to New York, he would come down to visit me. The next morning, he boarded his ship and I waved until he was out of sight…then took the lonely train journey back to Walton-on-Thames.

When I arrived home, my mother was not there. She may have been annoyed at me, and decided not to be present when I returned. She may have just gone to the pub for a drink. Whatever, the house was depressingly empty, I felt miserable and sorry for myself, and I went to lie on my bed. Mum eventually showed up and came to find me. When I tearfully told her that Neil and I had not consummated our relationship, she wept also—with relief.

The grand pack-up for America began.

A
FAREWELL PARTY
had been planned for me: a last big bash at The Old Meuse. Everybody came: Auntie, Dingle, my brother John, all the dancing students, Auntie Gladdy and her husband Bill, Susan, Trisha Waters, friends from far and near.

Pop became horribly drunk that night. He had a terrible case of gout, and was limping around on a cane. Toward the end of the evening, when the party was in full swing and everyone was dancing, he walked into the big living room and looked up at the saucer-shaped porcelain light fixture on the ceiling.

“I never did like that thing!” he said loudly. He suddenly attacked it with his cane, smashing it to pieces.

The guests made a swift exodus. My brothers and I were hurried to our rooms, and Pop went on a colossal rampage. He stormed around the house ranting and raving. He wrapped a towel around his fist and went out to Auntie and Dingle’s bungalow and punched out all the windows, saying, “I reckon that man owes me three hundred pounds!” He then punched Dingle, who somehow landed a punch of his own and gave Pop a bloody nose. My mother called the police, and Johnny called Dad, who came immediately and offered to take us all back to Ockley for the weekend.

I was due to leave for America in three days and had much packing to do, but I was hustled into Dad’s car along with Donald, Chris, and Mum. Auntie was in a terrible state, but she was with Dingle. I don’t know where they went that weekend.

Pop had been working himself up for days, his rage bubbling ever closer to the surface and threatening to explode. It may have been a coincidence that he acted out just as I was due to leave, but he must have seen that I was getting a great deal of attention. In contrast, Pop’s career in vaudeville was nonexistent, and his work as a cash register salesman was not proving successful. Auntie and Dingle’s presence on our premises seemed to drive him crazy; the dancing lessons taking place in the garden studio irked him, my mother’s support of my aunt and neglect of him…he probably felt he didn’t have a friend in the world or a place to call his own. And of course, he was an alcoholic. Later we discovered bottles of scotch and vodka stashed all over the house.

Mum found out that he’d put an ad in a “lonely hearts” magazine, seeking a dinner companion. When she asked how he could do such a thing, he replied that it wasn’t for sex, it was for company. I don’t know if that was true, but it was deeply sad and it rocked my mother’s world for a while.

So I spent my last weekend with Dad, Win, and the two boys. Mum returned to The Meuse the following day to talk to the police, who took Pop away, but they released him forty-eight hours later. My mother obtained a restraining order to prevent him from coming near the house, at which point I was able to go back and finish packing for my departure.

The restraining order was for several weeks. Mum was distraught. Auntie was panicked and angry. I was in a dilemma; how could I leave my mother and the boys? Would she ever be safe? I begged her to file for a divorce. She said that she would.

Suffice it to say that my departure for America was a nightmare. Everyone urged me to get onto that airplane for the U.S. My mother, Dad, Aunt Joan, Dingle, Auntie Gladdy, Charlie Tucker, Johnny, Don, Chris—they all came to Northolt Airport to see me off. Saying goodbye was agony. Mum and Auntie were stoic, telling me everything would be fine and not to worry. Go!

I remember the plane’s huge engines warming up on the tarmac. We had been grouped in a sort of army Nissen hut, which was the Northolt holding area for passengers. I walked across the concrete in the dark
night and up the steps into the big four-engine Constellation, to take my first transatlantic voyage.

I had not yet met any of my fellow company members, who were traveling to America on the same flight. Everyone was bubbling with excitement, wondering what awaited us overseas. I tried to fit in, but I was very preoccupied. I sat next to Dilys Laye, the young girl who would be playing Dulcie in the show, and she seemed worldly and calm and not at all worried. She was a pleasant companion. We decided on the journey that we would try to room together. We spent a sleepless night traveling from London to New York, stopping to refuel at Gander, Newfoundland, on the way.

The trip took about eighteen hours, and I was wiped out and emotionally exhausted by the time we reached that amazing city. I couldn’t stop thinking about the family. Would Mum hold out? Would she really go through with the divorce from Pop? What would happen to the house if she did? Where would she go? Would Don and Chris be all right? My
Boy Friend
salary was going to be small. I planned to send half of it home—but would that be enough for them, and would that leave enough for me to live on each week?

We arrived at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy) Airport on August 24, 1954. We walked down the steps of the plane onto the boiling hot tarmac, to be met by a horde of press and photographers who asked us to pose on a baggage trolley.

The first thing they said to us was “Show us some cheesecake!”

I kept saying, “Excuse me?” but a couple of the girls knew what they wanted and hiked up their skirts. I felt embarrassed that the moment we got there, we had to show them our legs.

I was met at the airport by a diminutive man named Lou Wilson, a friend of Charlie Tucker’s whom Charlie had arranged to be a sort of sub-agent/manager and keep an eye out for me. Lou was a small-time producer, entrepreneur, and a dreamer. He was sweet, kind, welcoming, and I warmed to him right away.

We were taken to the Piccadilly Hotel on Times Square and 45th Street (today it is the site of the Marriott Marquis Hotel). I was shown to
a small room on the third floor, directly above the convention halls. It was noisy and hot.

I had a single bed, a tiny shower, toilet, and washbasin, and a tiny window that looked out over a large airshaft. I remember shutting the door behind me, feeling alone and somewhat dazed.

That first evening, there was a small dinner reception for us at Sardi’s.

When Dilys and I returned to our hotel afterward, we piled into the elevator with a bunch of other people. A total stranger, a gregarious fellow, looked at us and said, “Y’all is mighty purty.”

“I beg your pardon?” His thick Southern accent was unintelligible to me.

“Y’all is mighty purty,” he repeated.

I grasped he was saying that I was pretty and I thanked him. He asked where I came from, so I politely told him, “Walton-on-Thames, Surrey,” and received an empty look.

“Ah come from Georgia,” he said.

“Oh, how nice,” I replied.

When Dilys and I got out of the elevator, I asked, “Did you understand a word that man said?”

“Nope,” she answered.

“Neither did I!”

But I did get the sense that Americans were very friendly.

Neil called from Canada, and I told him of the chaos surrounding my departure. He said, “I’ll come down right away.”

At sight of him, I really wept. I collapsed into his arms, and we tumbled into bed.