My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (12 page)

O
UR INTERVIEW WITH
A
NDRÉ
B
ISHOP WAS IN
J
ANUARY
’92. T
HE
following October, we were invited to do a reading in the dining room of the Cosmopolitan Club. Each time we had a date for a gig, it recharged us to do more work on the script. I was now off book. The reading was held in the ballroom. I was on a settee this time, certainly an improvement over the cantilevered lawn chair, but I was on a platform overlooking a sea of upturned faces. Again I felt the need to lean forward over the chasm between us. The response was respectable, apparently I was sufficient pre-dinner entertainment. George Dwight was there, along with Vreeland’s disapproving grandson Alexander, who, I was told, left before it was over.

Around the same time I was granted an audience with Lucille Lortel, the owner of the Theater de Lys (renamed the Lucille Lortel Theatre after her death). I was instructed by the young man who opened her apartment door to shout, as Ms. Lortel was very deaf. I was seated in a chair facing her. Our knees were touching. I started to read and she stopped me: “Stop shouting!” she shouted. “I can hear you perfectly well.” I ploughed on in a miserable monotone until the end. Out on the street afterwards, Mark and I quarreled. He was furious that I didn’t do a better reading, but there was no way in that situation to perform, to do anything but muddle through.

W
E ALSO FOUGHT OVER POSSIBLE PERFORMANCE VENUES
I
DREW
the line at riverboats. I was not going to go down the Mississippi as a tourist attraction. Later, however, I did go up the Amazon performing the play on a Theatre Guild cruise. For me, Patricia Neal was the one bright light onboard. She sang for her supper by telling the story of her romance with Gary Cooper, her subsequent marriage to Roald Dahl, and the tragedies that befell her children. The story was riveting and she told it without a shred of self-pity. I’ve never met anybody so completely devoid of ill will. The sound cues from the show were all off. Not that any of it mattered. Standing in the reception line after the show as the elderly audience shuffled past, the repeated question was, “Why the rouge on your ears?” My stock answer, “Because her mother did it,” finally withered into, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

M
Y WHOLE LIFE
, I
SEEMED TO HAVE BOYFRIENDS OF FOREIGN EXTRACTION
. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Maybe I wanted to throw it in my parents’ face, they were so obvious about wanting me to find a nice-looking preppie from a “good” family, no matter how dumb or dull or drunk. Or maybe I just identified with the underdog.

Shortly after my marriage ended, I went out to the Cincinnati Playhouse for two months to play Lady Would-be in Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
. When I got off the plane in Cincinnati a young person handed me a padlock key to the place where I was to live. I thought, Oh God, they’re putting me in a broom closet. We drove up to a little house down a few steps from the street and there was a padlock on the door. I opened it, stepped inside, and fell in love. Besides the bedroom, kitchen, and bath, there was a living room with a terrace that overlooked the Ohio River. I had without question the best digs in the company. I immediately threw a party for the cast. Eddie, a young black actor, stayed behind to help me clean up. He wouldn’t leave. He was twenty-three, I was thirty-seven. He was funny and charming and smart, and for a short while we were very much in love. I had never had a lover like Eddie. I would have done anything for him. I bought him a motorcycle. He introduced me to soul music—the Four Tops, Roberta Flack, the Temptations—and he showed me how to move, to separate my pelvis from my upper body. Eddie lived in Chicago, but when the show was over, and even though I warned him “you can’t live on love,” he followed me to New York and moved in with me. We would be wildly happy together for a few days, and then he would fall into these terrible depressions. I thought it was because the black actors he had contacted in the city had no desire to help a brother get work.

And then I got pregnant. This was 1969, shortly before abortion became legal. I knew women who had gone to this clinic in Puerto Rico. But I went to my GP, who, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was insane. It’s important to understand how a lot of doctors treated young unmarried women in those days. When a girl went to a gynecologist to be fitted for a diaphragm, it was common for him to ask how many men she had slept with. And I knew more than one girl who had been unnecessarily fondled while on the examination table, but said nothing through sheer intimidation.

I had been going to this guy for regular checkups ever since I came to the city. He had a proprietary attitude toward me, which I interpreted as protective. Being the daughter of a doctor and instilled with the belief that they were gods, I never questioned his attentions. Each time he examined my nether regions, he would exclaim, “My God, you should be married!” I would stop by for a B12 shot on the way to a rehearsal, and as I dashed out the door he’d say, “Got a minute for me to check your unnms?” while make squeezing motions with his hands. I viewed it as physicianly concern.

So I listened when he told me I couldn’t have the child because I was thirty-seven and the child would be retarded. I knew I shouldn’t have it, but he robbed me of making that choice. He didn’t want me to go to “some filthy, dirty clinic” in Puerto Rico either. He would arrange for me “a clean, safe abortion right here in the city.” Then he asked how much I could pay. I had about a thousand dollars in savings. He gave me the name of a doctor who would do it, a Park Avenue gynecologist. When I called him, he told me to meet him on the corner of Madison Avenue and 54th Street and bring a thousand dollars in cash. I saw a black Cadillac idling at the curb. The door opened, a hand gestured, I got in. The doctor was wearing dark glasses. I gave him the cash. I was in a low-budget mafia movie.

The whole experience was something out of a Fellini nightmare. It took place in a building just off Madison in the 60s, around the corner from fashionable art galleries. It wasn’t exactly a hospital. A woman, not a nurse, handed me a jelly glass saying, “Pee-pee in this,” and pointed to what looked like a broom closet. It was indeed a broom closet, with a toilet in it; once seated it wasn’t possible to completely close the door. The room I was assigned to wasn’t much bigger. It had two beds jammed so close together only one person at a time could get in or out. Fortunately or not, the woman in the other bed didn’t move. She could have been dead for all I knew.

The operation was to take place the next morning. I couldn’t sleep, I read
Portnoy’s Complaint
from cover to cover. Somewhere in the middle of the night, a man with a bad toupee and a paper sunflower sticking out of the pocket of his green surgeon’s shirt came in and winking broadly asked if I was “Mrs. Wilson.” Maybe they thought by this time any sane woman would have fled the place. The next morning, as I was wheeled into the operating room, I noticed paint peeling off the ceiling. As I went under, I heard the doctors laughing loudly about something. The rest of that day I cried. I cried myself to sleep that night. I wasn’t prepared for the grief that swallowed me.

A week later, an actress friend told me she had just had an abortion in Puerto Rico. The clinic was spanking clean, she paid $500 by check, she had the operation the day she flew in and flew back that night without removing her false eyelashes.

When I came home from the hospital, I found lying on the desk these photographs of two black women. I looked closely: one was Eddie’s girlfriend from Chicago who must have come to visit, and the other was Eddie. He admitted his compulsion to dress up. It was a terrific shock, but I felt pity for him. I loved him. I took him shopping, helped him find dresses and a wig and makeup and canoe-size high heels. Helping him dress was exhausting. He ended up looking like the Seagram Building while I looked like his charlady. He was a cute guy, but a really ugly woman. And boring. She was a completely different personality.

After a while, dressing up wasn’t enough; Eddie wanted to go out with me in public. I couldn’t do that. I absolutely refused, but he said if I loved him I would do it. I relented. This was the era of the maxi coat, boots, and false eyelashes. We got all dolled up, me and my gigantic girlfriend, and went up to West 57th Street to see Visconti’s
The Damned,
a film showing Nazi officers dressing up in women’s panties and garter belts. I was in a state of terror. Surely people noticed this giantess in the wig standing next to me. I was certain we were going to run into Hal Prince or Dick Cavett. We didn’t, but I refused to go out with him/her again. Still, my heart ached for him.

We were together for about a year. Toward the end, Eddie got a job at Macy’s for the Christmas holidays, and then spent most of his salary on an aquarium for me. The last thing I needed: fish, fish food, net, pump. God. A few months later he left me for some other woman snarling, “I can’t make you happy!” No, he couldn’t. When he left, Hugh came over from next door and in a rare gesture put his arms around me. He said I should cut the boy’s heart out and keep it in the fish tank.

I
N THE SEVENTIES
I
OFTEN SAW PHOTOGRAPHS OF
M
RS.
V
REELAND
living it up at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol and Candy Darling. I read about her in 1971 when she was fired from
Vogue
, and then again in ’73, when she took a job at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum. She was later quoted as saying, “I was only 70. What was I supposed to do, retire?”

The website Diana
Vreeland.com
on her work at the Met:

I adore artifice! —D.V.

V
REELAND MADE A LOT OF COSTUME PRESERVATIONISTS FURIOUS
by making new gowns for eighteenth-century models, even cross-pollinating eras. She would not have allowed Leonardo’s “Last Supper” crumbling to dust on the convent wall in Milan to be shown without a complete makeover.

I went to her Hollywood exhibit: Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, and Joan Fontaine in gorgeous gowns by Adrian and Edith Head. Her voice on the little tape machine describing what I was seeing was in itself a great treat.

The story goes that during work on her last exhibit on India, she was blind and confined to her bed, so she had friends like designer Bill Blass check things out for her and report back. He told her that there was something “off” about the models in their saris—something inauthentic. She mulled this over, then telephoned the workers and ordered them to cut all the dress models in half and remove about three inches from their middles. They were put back together and then they looked right—they looked like the Indian woman.

W
E WERE LOOKING UNDER ROCKS FOR PEOPLE TO TAKE AN
interest in our script. We sent
Full Gallop
to theater owners, literary agents, anybody who had known Vreeland, and everyone else we could think of. We heard about this play-reading group at Lincoln Center under the aegis of John Guare. I was friendly with John, we ran into each other in the Village all the time, so I dropped the script off with a note at his apartment. One day, months later, I bumped into him and he spluttered, “Mark Hampton the designer’s a friend of mine! I didn’t know he was a playwright!” There was indeed the designer Mark Hampton. There is also the Native American film actor Graham Greene, but I would not in a million years mistake him for the Graham Greene who wrote
The Heart of the Matter
.