My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (13 page)

Sybil Christopher had been very cordial to me when I shared a dressing room with her daughter Kate Burton when she was making her Broadway debut as Alice in
Alice in Wonderland
in the late seventies. I called her about considering the script for her Bay Street Theatre. It was a very odd conversation—well, not a conversation at all, as she fended off all inquiries by launching into a diatribe having to do with stopping smoking that so defied interruption I eventually hung up.

We sent the script to the director Mark Lamos, who ran the Hartford Stage. I had just worked with him. I heard nothing from him until months later, in another chance encounter, I mentioned the script to him. He opened his mouth wide, inhaled deeply and shouted, “I
LUHUHUHOST
IT!”

We sent it to Lynn Meadow at the Manhattan Theatre Club and received a note thanking us, but informing us that MTC didn’t do monologues. I even pressed the script onto my pal Nicky Martin, and watched as he let it slide out of his hand onto the floor.

The fact is, if you never want to hear from somebody again, send them your play. I confess that I myself have been sent plays I didn’t ask for, and I know what it feels like; you resent the obligation. Still, our script was positively anemic compared to some of the phone books I’ve received over the years—deadly opuses with cover letters from the playwright saying they had me especially in mind for the lead, which was usually a backwoods hag with herbal powers or an angry, gin-swilling ex-cop with cancer. I imagined the playwright in his garret scribbling away and thinking, “Gee, this really stinks. This is perfect for Mary Louise Wilson.”

You have to know somebody. And they have to need you. They have to have a hole in their schedule and a healthy budget, and then they might be interested. Whether the play is any good or not has little bearing here. As Mae West said to the little girl who exclaimed “My goodness!” when she saw her diamonds, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”

Several people rejected the script because it “lacked social significance.” I was shocked to realize how hidebound, sentimental, and literal-minded the theater establishment could be. Why wasn’t an evening in the company of a witty, worldly woman enough?

We sent the script to the talent agent I was with, who said he would pass it on to their literary department. Here’s the letter the reader sent back:

If anything could have crushed us completely it would have been this. It was obviously written by some half-wit kid. But it was in keeping with the general contempt that I suffered at the hands of these people who were supposed to be representing me.

A
RTHUR
L
AURENTS WAS DIRECTING A NEW PRODUCTION OF Gypsy
starring Angela Lansbury and he cast me as the stripper Tessie Tura. When I auditioned, I was asked to show my legs. I was delighted; they had never previously been required to audition. I couldn’t have asked for a better musical to be in.
Gypsy
has everything: great story, thrilling music, and wonderful characters. I saw the original production with Ethel Merman. Even when we were rehearsing our version, I sensed Jerome Robbins’s genius everywhere—in the tight script, the witty choreography, and the complete absence of sentimentality.

I was upset when Arthur kept me after school to rehearse. He said, “We don’t want that Mary Louise Wilson stuff.” What the hell was he talking about? I had great timing, I knew how to deliver lines like, “I don’t do no scenes. Now go screw.” Stephen Sondheim and Arthur were both at me for something more. They wanted Tessie to be prissy and affected. Arthur demonstrated by mincing around the rehearsal room, waving his wrists. I felt harassed and resentful, but I imitated him, and eventually got it. It was a great character choice. I didn’t feel underestimated by Arthur; on the contrary, he seemed a bit obsessed with me, enjoyed playing Svengali to my Trilby.

My costume was scanty and gorgeous with blue chiffon butterfly wings and a sequined butterfly flap that flipped smartly when I did my bumps. I wore a curly red wig and a headache band with quivering butterfly antennae, and I managed to go up on pointe in my high heels for at least two seconds.

We went on a six-month tour before coming to Broadway. By far the worst thing that could have happened occurred during the first week of rehearsals, when the young actress playing Miss Mazeppa, Jackie Britt, was killed in an elevator accident. She had gone downtown on the lunch break for a workman’s compensation hearing. It seemed that in each of the two shows she was in prior to this one, she’d had some kind of stage accident. We weren’t told what actually happened on this day, but Jackie was a high-strung girl and knowing how scared she was of Arthur and nervous about getting back late, we thought the elevator might have stalled and she panicked and tried to climb out. Sally Cooke who played Miss Electra, Denny Dillon who played Agnes, and I went to a coffee shop and sat there, stunned and weeping. As accustomed as I was to hanging out on my own, I bonded with them and we became buddies on the road.

S
ALLY
C
OOKE HAD THE LOOKS OF A BIG DUMB BLONDE, BUT LURKING
inside that voluptuous body, pale white skin, and baby voice was an eccentric polymath; she constantly surprised us with her knowledge of stagecraft, classical music, fine wines, and the Hebrew language, among other things. She was a master mechanic. You passed anything along the dressing room counter for her to fix, your eye pencil, your watch, and she lifted it up to her porcelain boobs, peered at it nearsightedly, fiddled with it with her long red nails, then passed it back down to you, fixed.

She was the only company member who travelled with a set of luggage rather than a steamer trunk. What she pulled out of those bags was flabbergasting. As we gathered at La Guardia for the start of the tour, she appeared in a hat and outfit—her recently deceased mother’s clothes—that Princess Grace might have worn. She seemed to be fond of wearing other people’s clothes. During rehearsals in Toronto, she wore Denny’s chesterfield coat which, on her, was a three-quarter-length jacket. The rest of her getup was the same every day: jeans, yellow Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, and hair in tiny pigtails. Her sense of style seemed to have been formed by old Hollywood movies. On our day off, she lay on her bed in a gauzy black negligee and satin scuffs with marabou pom-poms, doing her nails and listening to Bach on the radio. One night in Denver four of us arranged to meet at a triple-A restaurant. Sally showed up in a red velvet evening gown, white fur stole and tiara. She had ordered our wines in advance by telephone.

Above and beyond all this, Sally was an extraordinary cook. On the road in Texas, for somebody’s birthday she baked a
genoise
cake in her motel room; the white icing with perfect little rosettes looked so beautiful nobody wanted to cut into it. Back in New York, she gave a dinner party in her apartment for the entire company, stagehands, producers, creators, et al.—thirty to forty people. While the composer Jule Styne sat at Sally’s spinet playing out-take numbers from the show, some of which seemed to be about how underneath it all Rose was a nice person, a few of us blew kisses to the memory of Jerome Robbins for cutting them. Sally sat calmly on a stool just inside her kitchen in a blue velvet dress with a ribbon in her hair, stirring chocolate for the hand-dipped candies she later served for dessert while we jostled each other to get to the main course, Chicken Kiev. Chicken Kiev for forty. Think about it.

Sally—funny, generous, unfathomable. I hope wherever she is, she’s getting the love she deserves.

B
ESIDES PLAYING
T
ESSIE
, I
WAS ALSO UNDERSTUDYING
A
NGELA
Lansbury’s Rose. I loved working on the part, and having regular rehearsals on the road gave structure to my days, but it didn’t occur to me that I would ever have to go on for Angela. Angela was a strong, energetic woman. I felt perfectly safe. When we got to Los Angeles, however, I was told that I would be going on as Rose in a special matinee performance.

Nothing before or since has ever frightened me as much as this. I was told three weeks in advance, which gave me plenty of time to turn to stone. I rehearsed daily with the understudies, but in the shower I could not recall the lyrics beyond “Some people can—,” the opening number.

The show had an electronic runway that moved out over the orchestra pit for “Rose’s Turn,” and one day Baby June’s British stage mother saw me practicing on it backstage. “You want to be very careful, you know,” she offered, “you could so easily fall into the pit and hurt yourself.” Life imitating art. Angela told me to just keep my eyes on the runway lights and I would be fine. She showed me where in “Rose’s Turn” it was possible to grab a couple of deep breaths. “Remember to breathe,” she said. This is possibly the best advice I ever got about performing in general.

On the day before D-Day, I did a run-through with the actual cast. We performed in an airless rehearsal room for the producers and staff. They were sitting inches away from me, along the wall, and I shouted into their stony faces, number after number. Nobody rushed to me afterwards to assure me of a job well done.

The theater was the immense Los Angeles Schubert, with its two thousand one hundred semi-reclined, plush velvet seats, no center aisle. As the overture started, unseen hands guided me through steel doors and down endless concrete hallways to the back of the house, to the aisle I would come down, clutching my miniature Yorkie and shouting, “Sing out, Louise!” The next thing I knew, I was standing onstage in total darkness, I couldn’t think, hear, or see. As the intro to my first song started, I began to make out the conductor’s face through the blackness. He had a large white face, like a moon. I watched this moon as it mouthed each lyric just ahead of the beat. I made it through. I made it through the next moment and the next, and the darkness began to recede, bit by bit.

I didn’t have to think about which scene came next as unseen hands guided me to each new entrance. Then, suddenly, before “Rose’s Turn,” there was nobody there. I was standing alone in the dark, flipping the velour curtains muttering, “Where, where?” when there below me I saw the little runway lights; the runway was moving out over the orchestra pit. It seemed like a couple of miles to the other end. With her long legs, Angela had sprinted across it like a gazelle. I was the size of a peanut next to her. Somehow I made it—I got through it all without collapse. I had a large supply of very real desperation for Rose’s last “For me! For me!” There were many actors in the audience that day who could appreciate the understudy’s ordeal. They gave me a wonderful reception.

After the show, a bunch of us drove to Joe Allen’s bar to celebrate. As we entered, everybody at the bar was turned toward the door and they burst into wild applause. We were amazed to witness this kind of reception in L.A. Once we got inside, we saw the television set above the entrance displaying a football game. They were applauding a touchdown.

The British love to tour. Having understudied Angela Lansbury in
Gypsy,
Jane Connell said, “Oh, Mary Louise, you are going to clean up in summer stock!” meaning I would get to play Rose in places like the Melody Fair tent in North Tonawanda, New York. Now the truth is, I have no desire to play the provinces, and I loathe tents. But I needn’t have worried, because after a successful run in the West End, then touring the U.S. for six months, and then playing ten months on Broadway, Angela went on for the entire summer circuit, including North Tonawanda, New York.

I
’
VE BEEN ON THE ROAD THREE TIMES
. O
NE GENERAL RULE IS, THE
farther away the cast gets from home the more they start sleeping around. You fall into bed with people you wouldn’t ordinarily throw sticks at. At the same time, you become extremely finicky about whom you eat with. Everybody knew who was sleeping with whom and didn’t care, but there were clandestine meetings about where to eat. “
Psst,
meet us on the corner. We’re going to O’Reilly’s, but don’t tell Don!” Listening to the sweet little character man describe his preference for the
haricot vert
over the green bean for the fortieth time acted on me like a hot cattle prod up my ass. He had to go. Likewise the character actress who was in the habit of pummeling the waiter with instructions, her lamb rare but not bloody, her salad with the tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, and dressing on the side, the nuts removed from the nut roll.

You had to be extremely careful. As you headed out, you would hear behind you plaintive bleats; “Where’s everybody going?” “Where are you all going to eat?” and if you didn’t immediately scoot around a corner, you would find yourself entering a restaurant in a mournful herd. Table for forty, please. It would take an hour to get a waiter, another to give the orders, another for the food to arrive, and a final two for the Division of the Dinner Check. This was a mathematical nightmare usually cheerfully undertaken by the actor who had a degree in accounting and who wanted to know who had the whipped cream on his pecan pie because that was ten cents extra. In the end, the pot usually came up short because when it was time to pay up somebody was usually in the john.

In
Gypsy,
Denny and Sally and I liked to dine together in fancy restaurants. For starters, Sally would order a baked Alaska with chocolate ice cream and a stinger, and when the waiter’s eyebrows shot up she sweetly exclaimed, “People don’t realize how good mint and chocolate are together!” No squabbling over the check, we just split it three ways.