Read My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir Online
Authors: Mary Louise Wilson
Tags: #BIO005000, #BIO013000, #BIO026000
The Milliken people decided I was their new darling and called to tell me they had written their next show around me. I was in previews for
Flora the Red Menace
and I couldn’t imagine getting up at dawn to sing and then doing the same at night. I thought my lungs might fall out. I turned them down, once again guilt-ridden for not having the requisite chutzpah. They never forgave me. I was cast in subsequent shows, but in tiny roles. It felt like punishment. I didn’t know producers took things so personally. Still, the bonuses were worth it; enough to build my house in the country.
The last industrial I did was a one-day job for Cy Martin, Clothier to the Stars, in the Royal Box at the Americana Hotel. Besides myself, this one starred a guy in a leprechaun suit, two Latin Quarter beauties, and Harry Lorayne, the “memory expert.” One day, a few weeks after the show, I passed Harry on the street. I said, “Hi, Harry!” but he didn’t remember me.
M
Y PARENTS WERE TORN BETWEEN SHOCK AT MY CHOICE OF HUSBAND
and delight that I was finally married. They eventually got used to Chibbie and accepted him. Hugh and Taffy reacted with dismissive sniffs. Some of my snobbier friends made it obvious that they thought I had married beneath me. He and I didn’t share the same tastes. I deplored his choice of menswear and bad oil paintings. But Chib was basically a sweet man, and lost, like me. At least I got some decent bed linens, and silverware out of it.
I thought being a married couple would make it easier to appear at social events. The agony of getting dressed up and arriving alone at a party was over, now that there were two of us. As things turned out, it took twice as long to get ready, and sometimes both of us ended up standing in the closet in tears.
The good thing about the marriage was that it allowed me to turn down jobs I didn’t want with the excuse that I had to be with my husband. I was hiding. I spent most of the marriage watching Julia Child on television and cooking dishes like
choucroute garnie
and Beef Wellington in our vestigial kitchen. Sometimes Chib would cook innards or brains and the smell drove me out of the house. We had a fight once when I was in the middle of cooking a lamb navarin. I threw a bulb baster at him and then left to sit in the park and cool off. When I got back he had finished making the dish. We sat down and ate and it was delicious. We were pushing back out chairs when Maybelle my English bulldog started to retch. After a moment she threw up the herb bouquet.
Chib wouldn’t allow Maybelle to sleep on the bed. Once he said, “You love that dog more than me!” I said of course I did. I didn’t see anything odd about that. He didn’t really love me any more than I him. We were both so moribund. We had nothing else in common. We lay side by side in bed like graven knights on their tombs, sneering at the television. “Look! That’s a hairpiece! So obvious.” “Her eyes have completely disappeared!” “He has the biggest schwanz in Hollywood.”
Chibbie got cast as the Captain in
Man of La Mancha
when it opened in the Village in ’65. I went to see the first preview and informed him that it was a bomb, it wouldn’t last a week. It turned out to be a huge hit and I ended up accompanying members of his family as well as my own to see it, and watching in astonishment as tears dribbled down their cheeks. Our apartment was littered with figurines of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. My absolute limit for staying in any show was eleven months, but Chib was one of those actors who stays with a show until it closes.
La Mancha
lasted five years. Longer than our marriage.
It wasn’t all bad times, but after three years we agreed to end it. The depth of my sorrow surprised me. I had an overwhelming sense of failure.
Almost thirty years later, I was pinch-hitting for the vacationing actress playing Parthy in
Show Boat
. I passed the open door of Cap’n Andy’s, i.e., John Cullum’s, dressing room and saw him and the actor Jack Dabdoub, who played Vallon. They were chortling away about something. I asked what was so funny and Jack asked if I ever knew a character actor named Cibelli. I said yeah, I was married to him. They both looked like they’d been smacked. I asked, “Why? What’s so funny?” “Oh,” Jack said, “we were just remembering how gloomy he was, uh—I just came from his wake. Oh, that’s my cue!” and rushed onstage.
I have no competitive sense, so I just went ahead. See, if you compete, you’re looking left and right and it holds you back. I knew no one knew what I knew and I didn’t question it. —D.V.
I
N THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES, AUDITIONS WERE HELD IN THEATERS
. I was let in the stage door by an ancient doorman who gestured me to stand in a spot just offstage, jammed up against redolent old ropes and set pieces. My heart thumped in the hushed darkness. Then a smiling man with a clipboard approached and whispered, “Miss Wilson?” Then he walked onto the stage and announced my name. A moment, then he beckoned, and I walked out. I had my script. I couldn’t see my executioners sitting out front. Disembodied voices greeted me from the dark, then asked me to read. Standing center stage in the single light, framed by the proscenium and enveloped by darkness on all sides, I immediately felt, I belong here. My voice feels right here. All my young life people have been telling me to lower it, but here I can be heard in the top balcony.
Sometime in the seventies, auditions began to be held in dance studios: big, airy rooms with sun pouring through the windows, mirrored walls, fluorescent lights, and booming acoustics. Down at one end was a long table where the firing squad sat. If it was for a play, I sort of wandered two thirds of the way down, almost within shooting distance. For a musical, floating roughly halfway down like a buoy was an upright piano. You swam to it. There was no place to hide. I didn’t know what to do with my arms, where to put my eyes. Look right at them? Over their heads? Shut them? Now that I could see their eyes, I could see boredom, squirming, sleeping, even eating—lunch I suppose—as I attempted to shake their world. Hopeless.
Film interviews with people from L.A. who are in town for the weekend are often held in Midtown hotel rooms; I sit in a tiny room on a squishy sofa, knee to knee with the director while sinking helplessly into a semi-recumbent position. I’ve been told I won’t have to read, the call is to “meet the director.” It’s a personality contest. I do my impersonation of a hip gal, then they give me a script and ask if I wouldn’t mind reading a few lines. I step into the hall to look it over, then come back in. It’s no use.
I’ve been auditioning for some fifty years now. You never get beyond it. Once you think of yourself as “known,” the people who knew you have been replaced by younger people who’ve never heard of you.
I would rather eat bulls’ balls than audition. I would rather be hung by the ankles in a public square. Upside down. In the nude.
The very thought of having to compete makes me want to lie down and die. I am filled with resentment that I have to prove myself over and over again. The first time I look at a part I’m sure I’m not right for it. If the character is “wealthy and aristocratic” I’m too scruffy, I don’t have the fingernails for it, not to mention the earrings. If she’s an Okie, “poor and shabby,” I’m too refined. “Homely?” Too attractive. “Kindly?” Hard as rocks. But then who the hell am I? I have no idea.
Getting ready, I drag everything I own out of the closet and try it all on, attempting to find the character in the clothes. The room is festooned with discarded outfits, I crash around in one shoe moaning, banging my head with a hairbrush, wishing me like to one more rich in hope. I end up doing everything but studying the script.
It didn’t occur to me that I should put any extra muscle into a reading, that I should try to perform. My attitude was, I will simply read the lines and let them see what potential I have. How could I be expected to do more when I don’t know the script? When they didn’t respond, I was stunned. Silence followed by “Thank you,” then out onto the street. This happened so many times I became convinced I had lost my talent.
I
N THE NORMAL PROCESS OF LEARNING LINES, ONCE YOU
’
VE LEARNED
them they sink into some subterranean cave below conscious memory. You don’t try to think of a line while performing any more than you think about your feet while jumping rope. But if I lose my concentration and go blank in a play, at least I can take a pause or two or four, or improvise. When I’m singing, there’s something about just knowing I can’t stop that can cause me to crash and burn. I have a lifelong affliction of going blank on song lyrics. The music is a speeding train coming toward me and I’m tied to the tracks. A full orchestra is racing over me and the more important the occasion, like opening nights, the critics or the President out front, the stronger the likelihood of me causing everything to come to a screeching halt. This is why I beg people not to say who’s out there. It could be your great aunt Mabel, but if I thought of her, I would go down.
I had no desire to be a singer, but it seemed that in order to be funny a person had to sing. And dance! No. I don’t dance. At least, not in public. Alone in my living room with “Light My Fire” on the radio, I can swivel my hips with the best of them. But the moment a choreographer looks at my feet and says, “a one, and a two, and a three,” I’m a dead person. I’m back in algebra class.
The usual call for singing auditions was a ballad and an “up-tune.” The up-tune was to see if you could carry a beat. I couldn’t swing and click my fingers. It would be like asking Buster Keaton to smile, which I believe the poor guy was once forced to do, years after his film fame, when he was playing the mute King in a national tour of
Once Upon a Mattress,
and the photographer taking a cast photo yelled: “Hey you! Yeah, you with the hat! Give us a smile!”
I didn’t sing at musical auditions, I shouted. And I couldn’t shout in the song’s original key, somebody had to transpose it down a few feet. There were accompanists who could transpose on sight and those who couldn’t, and sometimes I didn’t know who was which until it was too late and disaster ensued. I eventually learned to bring my own accompanist. One of my first accompanists was a tall, pimply teenager named Marvin Hamlisch. He was working his way through college playing piano. And he played piano like a fourteen-piece orchestra. I was in his family’s apartment practicing a song one day and his mother came into the room wailing, “Marvin! Please! Eat a little!” It was like a Clifford Odets play. Marvin soon graduated to bigger things.
W
ITH THE ADVENT OF
J
ONI
M
ITCHELL AND
C
AROLE
K
ING
, auditions called for songs with a rock beat. The only pianist I knew who could play a rock beat was Wally Harper. When I asked him to play for me, he said, “Mary Louise, do you know why people laugh when you sing?” I didn’t know people were laughing. I was torn between being offended and pleased, I’m so craven for laughs. He said, “Because you forget to breathe!” He refused to play for me but he offered to teach me how to sing.
Wally Harper, skinny, bucktoothed, brilliant Wally, was the creator and other half of Barbara Cook’s singing act. They were just beginning to put it together when I began working with him.
Wally gave me a voice. He would straddle the piano bench and hold down my uvula—a dangling piece of flesh that hangs in the back of the throat, dear reader—and give me a note, and slowly he stretched my vocal cords until one day a note popped out that sounded like an adolescent boy’s. My range began to expand. He gave me a head voice; some decent sounds between middle and high C.
Wally was a musical genius: behind closed doors, alone with him at the piano, I lost my inhibition. He got me to sing with real feeling. One day he persuaded me to sing in front of some friends. I clutched. It didn’t go well. I was like the frog in that famous cartoon: a man opens a box and a frog hops out singing and tap dancing. The man sees dollar signs. The frog is reciting Shakespeare and singing “Vesti la Giubbe” as the man is running to a talent agent with the box. When he gets to the agent he opens the box, the frog jumps out, goes down on all fours and croaks.
W
E HAD SENT A COPY OF
F
ULL
G
ALLOP
TO THE
P
LAYWRIGHTS
Horizons Theater, and out of the blue one day, the then dramaturg, Tim Sanford, called us. He said he thought there was something interesting about our play and offered to give us a reading. We were thrilled. I was sure this would lead directly to a full New York production.
Until now, I hadn’t realized the importance of Mrs. Vreeland’s seating arrangement. For the Playwright’s reading, I was given one of those cantilevered metal chairs you see outside motel units that tilts you backward. I was peering over my knees to see the audience. The strain nearly killed me. Our audience turned out to be mostly friends and well-wishers, in spite of the huge mailing we sent out.
T
HE READING TOOK PLACE ON THE SAME DAY THAT
A
NDRÉ
B
ISHOP
, then head of Playwrights, was leaving to take over as Artistic Director of Lincoln Center Theater. On top of this, during the reading I developed a massive toothache in a back molar, which was extracted the next morning. I already had a dental history with André: I was in
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You
at Playwrights, and then
Baby With the Bathwater,
and I told him I had to leave
Bathwater
because my front tooth was falling out. I have a memory of this gentle, soft-spoken man peering solicitously into my mouth. I was too embarrassed to mention that my dentist, a coke addict recommended to me by my friend Pamela Reed, had stuck my temporaries in with Crazy Glue and that it wasn’t working.