My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (23 page)

The rehearsal space can be hell as well. In rehearsals for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
at the Geva Theater in Rochester, there was a wide column, apparently load-bearing, dead center of George and Martha’s living room. We had to peer around it to insult the guests.

I
N THE LATE EIGHTIES
I
WENT ON TWO ROAD TOURS
:
T
HE
O
DD
C
OUPLE
(Female Version),
with those incomparable comediennes Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers; and
Social Security,
with that great theatrical duo, Lucie Arnaz and Larry Luckinbill.

I wasn’t nuts about signing on for a three month tour in
The Odd Couple,
but I was newly sober and raw, stripped of my cover. I badly needed to be needed somewhere. It was only winter stock, and it would get me through the holidays. This was 1984. The director was Neil Simon’s brother, Danny. I had a history with Danny. He was a director on television’s Alan King Show in the Seventies. I was playing the Girl in the Owl Coat in Neil’s
Promises, Promises
when I was told that I was to be on the show. Apparently whenever Danny needed an extra woman he just called Neil and they sent over whomever was playing the Girl in the Owl Coat; like takeout.

The lines in the script read, “Anne,” “Jimmy,” “Jerry,” “Woman.” “Woman” was me. In the first sketch I was “Woman in hair curlers.” In those days, it was essential that funny women wear hair curlers. They had to look like hell. The rumpled writers, coughing, smoking, looking like they slept under a truck, argued: “It’s funny if she gets the pie in her face and then falls down,” “No, no, no, it’s funnier if she falls down first, then gets the pie in her face!”

The one redeeming thing about this experience was meeting the guest star. Lena Horne! She was relaxed and chatty. She watched horror movies on late night television and every morning she asked me if I saw the one the night before. “The man eats people’s brains! He loves to eat brains!” The night of the actual show, instead of her dressing room she changed in the wardrobe room next to the set. The wardrobe women wrapped a sari around her, she slid a bracelet up her arm, the double doors opened, and she glided out, hit her mark, and sang her first note just as the orchestra began.

The Odd Couple
jokes were pretty hoary. Mickey the Cop, my part, had one joke about my husband lashing me to the bedpost with my handcuffs. Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers were Florence (Felix) and Olive (Oscar). Rita was dark and skinny and Sally was plump and rosy in her matching flowered outfits and permed mass of blonde curls. It wasn’t clear to me who played which. The other poker players, Renee, Vera, and Sylvie, were played by a Sexpot, a Butterball, and a Behemoth, in that order. Every morning, the Behemoth barged into rehearsals, slapped a purse the size of Romania down on the table, and hijacked the conversation.

F
IRST READ-THROUGH: THE LAUGHTER IS DEAFENING
. H
UGE GUFFAWS
, table poundings, thigh-slappings. “Oh, oh, my eyes! I’m laughing so hard I can’t see!” “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this night after night!”

Danny to the Sexpot: I want you to change the way you do your lines.

SP: What do you mean?

D: It’s not funny. Cut the whiney stuff. Come on stronger.

SP: Wait a minute. I’m not computing this.

D: Don’t do this: (
imitates
) “Whaa whaa whaa.” Be strong. Come on stronger. Say the lines.

SP: Wait. (
in tears
) Give me a minute.

D: I will if you’ll come over to my hotel room and give me a massage.

SP: (
smashes fist into wall
) I’m totally confused now.

D: What’s the matter? I’m just telling you you’re not funny this way.

SP: Can I—I need a couple of minutes.

D: Okay, if we can have sex first. Everybody leave the room.

Rita sidles by: Hey people, we gotta nip this in the bud.

It dawned on me that we have been hired for our funny voices. The Sexpot has a husky rasp, the Butterball gurgles, the Behemoth honks, and I figure I was chosen for my bark.

When we finally get on our feet, it is a question who was directing. “Wait, wait!” Sylvie the Behemoth honks. “She should come around this way and hold onto me—and then I’ll come in like this and grab at her and then she’ll say her line!” And Danny says, “Great!” It’s komedy with a K. Vera the Butterball sidles up to me and gurgles, “Oy.”

On the ten-minute breaks, Sylvie throws a massive arm over the little man’s shoulders and marches him into corners for confabs. He looks like her lunch.

I long to escape. I’m very worried about my cat City Kitty now. I think I will be able to take him with me on tour, but the stage manager Marty sniffs: “Not possible.”

Our first stop is Dallas. The bus pulls up in front of the hotel and the company explodes through the doors, pushing and shoving to get to the desk first; “I can’t be above the second floor.” “I have to have a nonsmoking room.” “I need light. I have to have a lot of light.” They roar to the elevators; the doors closes, the elevators rise, then just as the second group is up at the desk, the elevators start back down again. The first group swarms out and shoves through: “There was a smoker in my room!” “The room you gave me is brown! It has brown walls!”

Downtown Dallas is a maze of Ozymandian edifices, banks bigger than St. Peter’s and twice as high. I had packed all seven volumes of
Remembrance of Things Past
. I planned to spend the next three months reading Proust, but after a week of hotel food—chicken stuffed with shrimp and beef balls in cream sauce with two string beans—I started spending all my free time searching for broccoli. I’m a mad woman scuttling through black glass canyons, muttering, “Where the hell is some broccoli?” There are no little places tucked up side streets, there are no side streets; just ramps onto freeways looping into the distance.

We open and everybody is jumping up and down, hugging, fist-pumping: “We did it!” “They loved us!” “We’re a hit! We’re a hit!” Trudging to our dressing rooms, Butterball grunts, “We’ll see.” Manny Azenberg the producer, Neil, and the odious Marty are in a huddle backstage.

Next morning I come down for breakfast, and the only other person in the dining room is Danny. “Mind if I give you your notes now? Wait for that laugh after Sylvie says her line about the hotel, and when you get up to move her chair and say that line about the chair, there’s a laugh there. You’re not getting the laugh when she crosses to you with the phone, you have to say it louder and you’ll get the laugh. In the second act you girls get a big laugh when …”

Arriving at the theater for rehearsal an hour later, Danny is nowhere to be seen. Marty informs us that from now on Neil will be our director. Neil has fired his own brother!

Downtown Houston is another city suffering from gigantism with musical fountains. A couple of us are in the wardrobe room complaining about getting scurvy from lack of fresh vegetables when the wardrobe mistress, something of a bank building herself, drawls, “Ya’ll want some good home cookin’?” We leap into her white Cadillac Seville, swoop onto the freeway, and eventually pull up to a cinderblock building. The mistress says this was where the “blue hairs” ate. Inside, television screens quoting scripture run along the wall; piled on hot tables beneath them, miles and miles of God’s real, fresh, home-cooked food. Roast beef, ham, chicken, turkey, corn, carrots, beets, squash, beans, beets, potatoes, cabbage, collards, spinach, tomatoes, and broccoli! Everything cooked three ways, plus cakes, cookies, puddings, and pies. We take two of everything.

Neil is not a people person. He writes brilliant dialogue and he doesn’t want actors fucking it up by acting. He proceeded to read his director notes to the cast and managed to insult just about everybody. He skips the custom of giving the stars their notes in private; Rita is fuming and Sally is crying.

Sitting at the poker table night after night, the Behemoth’s giant mandibles are everywhere at once, slapping cards around, tossing chips hither and yon, thighs jiggling belowdecks. Physical business is surreal: I cringe upstage, Vera totters, squealing in the path of a maddened dirigible, throwing furniture out of her way.
Bang! Crash! Oof!

The only really funny people in the show are the pinch hitters for the Pigeon sisters, played by Lewis J. Stadlen and this adorable kid in his first Broadway role, Tony Shalhoub.

I am having a session with my therapist on a pay phone nailed to a post on a sandy backstreet, sobbing and wailing about my stupid life, my mother, and this guy comes along, leans up against a fence and lights up. I signal I’ll be off in a minute, he shrugs, I go back to wailing.

Rumors of rewrites are relayed to us through Rosencranz the stage manager: “I spoke to Neil, he’s completely rewritten the first act, you know. Oh yeah, you’re not going to be playing poker any more. You’re going to be playing Trivial Pursuit!” Another step backward for womankind.

I call home. The guy watching City Kitty changed his name to Sydney.

We spend Christmas in Palm Beach: tinsel in the Palm court; the Behemoth bawling “Little Drummer Boy” off-key, and ordering us to join in.

I
’
VE BECOME OBSESSED WITH LIVING ARRANGEMENTS
. W
E
’
RE BEING
put in some unbelievable dumps. In Fort Lauderdale it was a motel on a landspit between two freeways and my dank room had wall-to-wall purple shag that had God knows what in it. I went looking and found this adorable little cottage on a sleepy back road. It has louvered glass windows on three sides. I can’t believe my luck. It’s like something out of
The Postman Always Rings Twice
.

I’ve been told to keep all the louvers shut up tight when I’m out because of the high crime rate. This means coming home to the inside of a toaster oven, but I can at least keep the windows open to the cooling night breezes while I sleep.

Last night I woke up to the most horrendous noise. This sleepy back road turns out to be a drag strip; all night long jalopies roared by inches from my pillow. Fume from hot throttles filled my nose.

I have moved to a motel near the beach. The room has windows overlooking a canal with a sign reading: CAUTION: MANATEE.

I thought this place had a kind of rustic charm until I moved in and realized it’s just rust. The pots and pans, the stove, the fridge, the forks and knives, the coat hangers, the television set, everything is covered in rust.

Today I found some Chopin on my little radio! I fixed a glass of Coke over ice and sat down with
Swann’s Way
and when I picked up the glass it dripped on the radio and killed it.

In Orlando we’re in one of those ubiquitous apartment complexes featuring coffin-shaped rooms with one heavily draped window overlooking trash bins. We’re in the middle of nowhere—no stores, not even sidewalks. I suddenly became frantic for a
New York Times
. I rented a car and drove to the nearest mall and to my utter delight, spotted a
Times
machine! I dropped in eight quarters and got two tissue-thin pages of “Business and Sports.” Just as I was about to start weeping I spotted a bookstore! A bookstore! I went in and prowled up and down the aisles, there was nothing but bodice-rippers and bibles. But then just as I was stomping out I spotted a
New Yorker.
Saved! I drove back to the room, got into bed and opened it. It was three months old. I’d already read it.

I
N
L.A. I’
VE BEEN ABLE TO RENT A LOVELY HOUSE IN
L
AUREL
Canyon. It has a wall of glass that slides open and connects the living room to the terrace.

I’ve been told that because of the Manson murders the glass wall needs to be closed and locked at night. There are no other windows in the house, so I sleep in an airless vacuum.

The burglar alarm has to be turned on when I go out. The burglar alarm is made of rubber. It has many rubber buttons, which I haven’t quite mastered. I try, God knows; I want to be thoroughly responsible. Today, halfway down Laurel Canyon, I realized I’d set the alarm but had forgotten to close the glass wall. Traffic down this endlessly winding road was bumper to bumper. Any thought of doing a U-turn was out of the question, so I left it all day and when I got back everything was fine. I suspect the rubber alarm is a fake.

Another reason I have to keep the wall shut is coyotes. When I told the company hairdresser that I’d had my cat, City Kitty, flown out to me, he became hysterical about coyotes. He said one had just killed his friend’s cockapoo in that same canyon. So much for easy living in the sunshine state nowadays.

In St. Petersburg, we are all in a huge pink palazzo. Right on the beach. There is a pool and parasailing. Crumbling decor inside, long smelly hallways. The dining room lined with Red Skelton’s original clown paintings. I love my tower room. My window looks out on blank blue sky. I am looking and am startled when this big blonde dolly drifts into view, so close I could have reached out and touched her. It was Sally Struthers, arms and legs sticking straight out, parasailing.

Reading
Swann’s Way
in bed in Baltimore, I come across Madame Verdurin, vulgar, overbearing, telling everybody where to sit and what to do. I am thrilled to recognize the Behemoth! Why is this such a pleasure? Everything is explained. Madam V plays her idea of a great society hostess, determined to climb to the top. Sylvie after sitting in a hot tub in LA. for the past twenty years is suddenly a Broadway insider as she strides the halls honking, “The nut is up! The nut is up!”